The Spiritual Meaning 
of *'In Memoriam" 

AN INTERPRETATION FOR THE TIMES 



By 
JAMES MAIN DIXON 

University of Southern California 



INTRODUCTION BY 

JAMES M. CAMPBELL 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



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Copyright, 1920, by 
JAMES MAIN DIXON 



FEB '^b iJ20 

©CU5B5017 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTEB PAOB 

Introduction 7 

I. Tennyson's Wonderful Forecasts 11 

II. Tennyson a "Twice-Born Man" . 15 

III. The German "Will-to-Power" 

Philosophy 19 

IV. Nietzsche's Double Morality. . 23 

V. Milton and Henry Drummond on 

"Will" 26 

VI. Providence, Puritanism, and 

KULTUR 29 

VII. Tennyson's Grasp of Modern 

Scientific Thought 32 

VIII. The Problem op "In Memoriam". 37' 

IX. The Crisis and the Dilemma. .. 40 

X. A Possible Solution 45 

XI. The "Wings op Faith" 50 

XII. The Barrier "Veil" 54 

XIII. Ideal Faith and Love 59 

XIV. Misconceptions OP "In Memoriam" 65- 

XV. George Eliot's Unsatisfactory 

Creed 71 

XVI. Thomas Hardy's Grim Pessimism. 79 

XVII. Tennyson on the "Word" 81 



6 CONTENTS 

CHAFTEB FAGB 

XVIII. Life and Immortality 85 

XIX. Immortality and the Bodily 

Frame 90 

- XX. Personality and Immortality. . . 95 

^ XXI. Philosophy, Science, and Immor- 
tality 103 

XXII. The Problem op Evil 109 

XXIII. The High Priest op German 

KULTUR 115 

XXIV. Tennyson and Plato 122 

XXV. Calvinism versus Machiavellian- 
ism 127 

xxvi. kultur and brotherly love. . . . 134 

XXVII. Machiavellianism AND Democracy 139 

XXVIII. Servile Philosophers 143 

XXIX. The "Lords of Hell" 146 

XXX. Spiritual Bankruptcy 150 

XXXI. Knowledge Without Reverence 

AND Charity 154 

XXXII. The Restitution of All Things. 162 

Bibliography 167 



INTRODUCTION 

Many writers have essayed the task of in- 
terpreting ^^In Memoriam" — ^the greatest 
poem of the foremost poet of the Victorian 
age. The fresh and original interpretation 
herein given by Professor James Main 
Dixon has in it certain outstanding features 
which differentiate it from all others and 
give to it a special claim for attention. By 
it that poem becomes a distinct message for 
the times. 

Tennyson knew his age, its intellectual 
perplexities and confusions, its spiritual 
aspirations and hopes, but, as Professor 
Dixon abundantly shows, he was both its 
representative and its leader, its historian 
and its prophet. In depicting his own 
struggle out of darkness into light, not only 
does Tennyson mirror the struggle of his 
times, he mirrors also the struggle of the 
race. He rises from the personal to the uni- 
versal; his sorrows are the sorrows of the 
world i his battle for faith the battle which 

7 



8 INTRODUCTION 

every honest soul must wage; his ultimate 
triumph over doubt a triumph in which every 
upstruggUng soul may share. 

The criticism that Tennyson was not a 
man of the people is just. He lived within 
a narrow circle of the intellectually elect. 
His hostility to home rule for Ireland was an 
index to his undemocratic attitude. But his 
limitation was in a measure counterbalanced 
by his love for man as man. And it is note- 
worthy that in his higher flights he tran- 
scends all of earth's poor distinctions and 
becomes the mouthpiece of humanity. 

Another point — ^which is something of the 
,/ nature of real discovery — is that the poem is 
the record of the experience of Tennyson 
himself as a twice-born man. This is made 
the illuminating center of the entire poem. 
It is claimed — and evidently proved — ^that 
nothing short of a distinct intellectual and 
spiritual conversion can account for the com- 
plete change which took place in Tennyson 
towards nature and hfe; the declaration "I 
held" clearly carrying with it the impUcation 
that what was held in the past had been out- 
grown ; and that old things had passed away 
and all things had become new. 



INTRODUCTION 9 

This explains the difficulty which Tenny- 
son at one time felt in reconciling faith in 
universal goodness with a nature "red in 
tooth and claw with ravine." That was not 
Tennyson's final position. He came to see 
that nature's gentler, fairer aspects are more 
in evidence than those that are stern and 
cruel; and that a deeper reading of her 
secrets shows that there is less difficulty in 
believing that God is love, "and love crea- 
tion's final law," than in believing the 
opposite. 

Another marked feature in the poem, 
which Professor Dixon brings out, is that 
while moving along the line of an expanding 
experience it sweeps past the material 
monism of Haeckel, and the philosophical 
monism of Hegel, to find a final resting- 
place for thought in the moral monism of 
Saint Paul. The present dualism of a world 
in the making Tennyson graphically por- 
trays; but from it he looked forward to 

"One far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves" — 

that far-oflF divine event being the reconcilia- 
tion of all things to God, and the establish- 



10 INTRODUCTION 

ing of a new and holy order in which he is 
all in all. 

But perhaps the greatest service which this 
fresh interpretation of "In Memoriam" will 
render to the average reader will be that of 
furnishing an antidote to the poisonous phil- 
osophy which underlies German Kultur^ by 
contrasting it with the wholesome and truly 
Christian philosophy which is at the bottom 
of Tennyson's later writings. Through much 
tribulation the poet enters into his king- 
dom, reaching the final philosophy of life 
and destiny, which is based upon the revela- 
tion of truth as the final source of authority. 

James M. Campbell. 



CHAPTER I 

TENNYSON'S WONDERFUL 
FORECASTS 

Few judgments of poetic values during 
the last decade or two have been more super- 
ficial than the constant underrating of Ten- 
nyson as a prim Victorian, best left to the 
appreciation of mild churchgoing people and 
gushing schoolgirls. The depth and sound- 
ness of his world vision are a marvel to-day 
to the real thinker, and he was rated at his 
proper value years ago by many leading 
minds. Half a century ago perhaps the 
ablest mind in any English university — and 
in some respects anywhere — was Benjamin 
Jowett, master of Balliol College, Oxford, 
who is best known as the translator and in- 
terpreter of Plato. Not only so, he was the 
teacher and counselor of many of the ablest 
statesmen whom his university has sent out 
to control the destinies of the British empire. 
' It was a remark of Jowett's that there is 
more of the fundamentals of philosophy in 

H 



12 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

Tennyson's "In Memoriam" than in any 
systematic philosophy of modern times/ 
Practically, it is the best antidote we have to 
the dangerous and poisonous teaching of 
Goethe, Nietzsche, Treitschke, and the whole 
modern school of German thinkers; its key- 
note — How futile man's will when it ignores 
the divine will! 

To those who fully understand the whole 
drift of Tennyson's teaching, who face the 
problems he worked out so sanely between 
the death of his friend Hallam in 1833 and 
the publication of his wonderful little volume 
in its simple brown cover seventeen years 
later, he appears to-day as a seer. All have 
marveled at the forecast of aerial warfare 
which he outlines in his "Locksley Hall," 
published in 1842 : 

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye 
could see, 
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder 
that would be ; 



Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there 

rained a ghastly dew 
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the 

central blue." 



OF «IN MEMORIAM" 13 

Happily he saw beyond this to the triumph 
of democracy: 

"Far along the world-wide whisper of the south- 
wind rushing warm, 

With the standards of the peoples plunging 
through the thunderstorm ; 

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the 
battle-flags were furled 

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the 
world." 

That he understood this prophecy in terms 
of our own republic we know from a lyric 
written in 1853, but unpublished during his 
Ufetime. Readers of Tennyson will find it 
in the notes to the authoritative editions of 
his complete works, edited, with Memoir, by 
his s(Hi Hallam. The lyric is prefaced by a 
note containing the significant sentences : "In 
later years, after the Franco-German war, 
my father was filled with admiration at the 
dignified way in which France was gradually 
gathering herself together. He rejoiced 
whenever England and France were in 
agreement and cooperated harmoniously for 
the good of the world." The stanza in 
"Hands all round" which particularly con- 
cerns Americans is the penultimate one: 



14 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

"Gigantic daughter of the West, 
We drink to thee across the flood ; 
We know thee most, we love thee best, 
For art thou not of British blood? 

"Should war's mad blast again be blown, 
Permit not thou the tyrant powers 
To fight thy mother here alone. 

But let thy broadsides roar with ours. 
Hands all round! 
God the tyrant's cause confound!" 

I know of no political foresight so wonder- 
fully and exquisitely just; it takes us back 
to the times of the Hebrew prophets. There 
has been a strange propriety in the coming 
in of the United States to aid the Allies, just 
as Russian support fell away. From the 
very beginning thoughtful men felt that au- 
tocratic Petrograd was an unsuitable part- 
ner in the great struggle, and that her 
presence made the fight political rather than 
humanitarian. And to-day, when the score 
of nations whom Germany has filled with 
righteous wrath meet in council to lay down 
the terms of a just peace, this council may 
well be termed the first "Parliament and 
Federation of the World." No representa- 
tive of tyranny will appear on the council 
board. 



OP *'IN MEMORIAM** 15 



CHAPTER II 

TENNYSON A "TWICE-BORN 

MAN" 

Most of the clear-sighted men of the past 
have had a crisis in their hves when once for 
all they chose a new and definite path in 
which to walk. To use a modern phrase 
which has given its title to a popular book, 
they became "twice-born men." It was so 
with Saul of Tarsus at Damascus; with 
Augustine; with Francis of Assisi; with 
Martin Luther; with John Calvin, who at 
the University of Paris suddenly changed 
from a bright literary aspirant into a vital 
religious force; with John Wesley at a cer- 
tain time and a certain place; with Thomas 
Chalmers, who began his ministry as a lec- 
turer interested in political economy and 
science rather than as a spiritual teacher. 
Tennyson underwent such a soul change, 
giving him a message to men. Before the 
year 1833, when his friend Arthur Hallam 
died, he had come under the spell of Goethe, 



16 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

and had accepted the highly intellectual 
hedonism of the Weimar poet as an accept- 
able rule of life. But the death of his dear- 
est friend, the personality who had shown to 
him for good what life and conduct meant, 
proved a stunning blow. It brought him 
face to face with the grim realities of a harsh 
world, and he had to return for safety and 
spiritual health to the sound evangelicalism 
of his childhood and early life. Otherwise 
the world meant for him vacant darkness and 
despair; Goethe's "Art" led nowhere but 
into a ruthless jungle. Nature was cruel at 
its heart. The record of this spiritual change 
is contained in the successive sections of his 
"In Memoriam," which finally develops into 
a discussion of the whole meaning of life. 

The opening Invocation is summative of 
the faith he has found after much storm and 
stress ; and its throbbing stanzas find a place 
in many of our hymnals. Four of them 
appear as Hymn 139 in the Methodist 
Hymnal: 

"Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 17 

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 

Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
He thinks he was not made to die; 
And thou hast made him: thou art just. 

**Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou: 

Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 

Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

"Our little systems have their day ; 

They have their day and cease to be: 
They are but broken lights of thee. 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 



)> 



There is much in these verses that reveals 
Tennyson as the Cambridge-trained man, 
who faced the facts of life and science, and 
desired no intellectual peace that meant in- 
tellectual weakness. He accepts, as fully as 
Milton did, the fact of our creation by God, 
but he does not go, like Milton, to Hebrew 
poetry and story for the rational interpreta- 
tion. Indeed, Tennyson's frank acceptance 
of evolution within reverent limits made his 
great poem a puzzle to many good people for 
quite a time. His use of the phrase "broken 
lights," taken from the phenomenon of re- 
fraction, is significant. The religious belief 
which shuts us out from the power and 



18 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

strength of life is radically unsatisfactory. 
But all knowledge and power gained by 
man, unless consecrated to the Lord of Love, 
are mere weakness in the long run. Love is 
the strong thing in life ; and virtue, both by 
derivation and its essence, implies strength. 
We must add to our faith, virtue, and to 
virtue, knowledge, if we desire to become 
complete men. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 19 



CHAPTER III 

THE GERMAN "WILL-TO- 
POWER" PHILOSOPHY 

The "twice-born man" is in a significant 
and essential way the "complete man" of the 
Pauline epistles; body, mind, soul in subjec- 
tion to a higher law, the will of God. The 
phrase which sums up the antithesis to 
Tennyson^s position was just coming into 
vogue when he was a schoolboy preparing 
for entrance to Cambridge — Schopenhauer's 
"will-to-power." This deifier of the human 
intellect, twenty years Tennyson's senior, 
and the friend of Goethe, saw clearly the 
grim cruelty of nature, and recognized that 
the mastery of its laws gave power but no 
happiness. He accepted the issue, and be- 
came a frank pessimist, declaring that a sci- 
entific monism is the only satisfactory philos- 
ophy of life. His successor, Friedrich Nietz- 
sche, gave the system of "will-to-power" a 
literary flavor and pungency in his Thus 
Spake Zarathustra. Dating some thirty 



«0 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

years later than "In Memoriam," it may be 
said to embody in a fanciful and stimulating 
way the orthodox creed at Berlin during the 
decade or two preceding the war. If the 
German people seem to have been mad with 
the lust of power during these four awful 
years, an explanation may be found in the 
frank acceptance, by the upper classes and 
the intellectuals, of the brazen philosophy of 
Nietzsche and his brood of thinkers. He was 
avowedly a disciple of Schopenhauer, to 
whom he devoted a book, Schopenhauer as 
Educator, which depicts the philosopher in 
glowing terms as one worthy to teach the 
growing generation, and lead them into 
ideals of life higher than those that satisfy 
the modern "philistine." 

Neither Tennyson nor Nietzsche was a 
"philistine." The term, so often found in 
the pages of Matthew Arnold, signifies a 
man with low-pitched conceptions of life, 
who is quite satisfied with the conventional 
in religion and art. Born, Uke Tennyson, in 
a parsonage, Nietzsche prepared to follow 
his father's profession ; and at one time in his 
academic career, drawing up a long list of 
the subjects he wished to master, he placed 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 21 

religion at the close as the "sole foundation 
of all knowledge." But later he began to 
reject the principal doctrines of Christianity 
as sops to sentimentality, appealing to the 
heart and not to the head. "They are 
symbols, just as the highest truths must be 
symbols of truths still higher." And so, in 
the words of a sympathetic biographer, he 
"renounced the broad and easy path of faith 
to struggle through the *heroic' path of free 
research. . . . He ceased to believe in the 
providential goodness and order of nature, to 
see in history the proofs of a divine reason 
and the sign of a moral will guiding the 
destinies of humanity, to interpret the events 
of our lives as trials sent by God to put us 
in the way of salvation."^ He desired to 
rescue "culture from the slough of democ- 
racy into which it had been allowed to sink."^ 
He would replace it by Kultur, It is re- 
freshing to note how he and his followers put 
Christianity and democracy in the same boat, 
to sink or swim together. 

Having thrown up religious faith and 
humility, he gives himself over to an over- 

^ The Gospel of Superman, p. 24. 
*Ibid.» IntroductioQ, p. ix. 



^2 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

powering vanity — a deification of the Self. 
"Behind thy feeling and thy thoughts, O my 
brother," he exclaims, "is to be found a 
powerful master, an unknown sage — he is 
called *self.' He lives in thy body; he is thy 
body." Man's "great reason" Nietzsche 
finds in the body with its instincts, and the 
"will-to-power" that animates it. It must 
be gratified at all costs. "How great my 
avidity !" he declares in one of his aphorisms, 
the Sigh of the Seeker. "In my soul there 
is no indifference — but a Self greedy — a Self 
which would lose nothing of what might 
belong to it." 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 23 



CHAPTER IV 

NIETZSCHE'S DOUBLE 
MORALITY 

NiETZSCHE^'s ethical ideals carried him 
politically to the development of an aristoc- 
racy, with an artificial morality of its own 
that is hard and intolerant. This noble caste 
of his, finding themselves in a minority 
amidst secretly hostile inferiors, must at all 
costs maintain, intact, in their own race, the 
quahties that have insured their triumph. 
How different from Tennyson's dream of a 
humanity with its Parliament of man! But 
his conclusions are a legitimate result of his 
rejection of religion. He does, indeed, bring 
in the Deity as a trailer to his intellectual 
machine: "Finally, an aristocratic race has 
its god, in whom it incarnates all the virtues 
by which it has attained its power, and to 
whom it shows by sacrifices its gratitude for 
being what it is. This god, which the aristo- 
crat conceives in his own image, must in con- 
sequence have the power of being useful or 



24 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

harmful, friendly or inimical, beneficent or 
maleficent; it is, indeed, the Vill-to-power' 
that has led the masters towards domination, 
that has made them strong and happy; and 
the cult which they make of it is the expres- 
sion of their joy of living, of the pleasure 
they take in themselves at being beautiful 
and powerful."^ 

When these fantastic deliverances came 
out thirty years ago, and were translated into 
English, they were regarded by ordinary 
people as the crazy notions of a madman, for 
Nietzsche died insane. Some few wiser 
people gave them more significance. 

Some two or more years after Nietzsche's 
death I was dining with my former teacher 
in philosophy, Robert Fhnt, in his house at 
Newington, Edinburgh. Flint was a man 
beloved by his students; his Theism and 
other books are well known on this side of the 
Atlantic. He had left the chair of moral 
philosophy at Saint Andrews, Chalmers's 
old post, for that of theology at Edinburgh 
University, and meanwhile I had been on the 
faculty of a foreign university. Several re- 
marks he made were worth remembering. 

* The Gospel of Superman, p. 121. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 25 

He maintained that German thought had 
been quite overrated, and that French think- 
ers had more of the future with them. He 
was greatly taken up with Nietzsche's 
philosophic tenets; more so than I could 
understand, for they seemed to me almost 
pure paradoxes. But Flint detected power 
in the man; and to-day he seems no madder 
than the whole German nation has been, up 
to and through the dreadful war. 

Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra was 
highly lauded in Germany as a work of 
genius, to be compared with Goethe's Faust. 
One of the leading musicians of the young 
German school. Dr. Richard Strauss, chose 
it as the subject of one of his best known 
symphonic compositions. That its teachings 
have entered into the German mind, have 
lodged there, and have helped to intoxicate 
the nation, seems only too certain in the light 
of recent events. The "aristocratic morality" 
of the Junkers and the German officers gen- 
erally during the war has verily been "hard 
and intolerant," not to say cruel, inhuman, 
and bestial. 



26 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER V 

MILTON AND HENRY DRUM- 
MOND ON "WILL" 

"Not as I will, but as thou wilt," were 
among the last words of our Saviour during 
his night of agony in the garden; his meat 
was to do the will of the Father who sent him. 
This is the fundamental of all Christian 
doctrine and conduct, of all democracy. The 
illegitimate assertion of the will, in opposi- 
tion to God — carnal pride — is rightly placed 
by Milton as the essence of evil. In his first 
speech in Pandemonium, to his fellows, after 
the recovery from their awful collapse, Satan 
insists on the assertion of will as giving the 
only hope of victory : 

"All IS not lost — the unconquerable will, 
And study of revenge, immortal hate, 
And courage never to submit or yield." 

He declares that to yield to God's will is to 
be a slave **to the tyranny of Heaven" 
(Nietzsche's "slave morality"). The whole 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 27 

story of "Paradise Lost" is the story of an 
angel who through willfulness finally shrinks 
into a hissing reptile. 

It was the writer's privilege when a 
student to listen during one summer to the 
preaching of Henry Drummond, then a pro- 
bationer and filling the pulpit of Ayr Free 
Church. The topic upon which he chiefly 
dwelt was the subjection of the will to God's 
will. I well remember the tall lithe form, 
the clear-cut features, the ruddy hair, the 
brilliant eye ; also the outstretched forefinger 
with which he emphasized the statement, 
"You must just find out the will of God." 
The fly-leaf of his Bible contained a sum- 
mary of his reflections on the subject: "To 
find out God's will: (1) Pray. (2) Think. 
(3) Talk to wise people, but do not regard 
their decision as final (4) Beware of the 
bias of your own will, but do not be too much 
afraid of it. (God never unnecessarily 
thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is 
a mistake to think that his will is in the line 
of the disagreeable.) (5) Meantime do the 
next thing (for doing God's will in small 
things is the best preparation for knowing 
it in great things). (6) When decision 



28 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

and action are necessary, go ahead. (7) 
Never reconsider the decision when it is 
finally acted upon; and (8) You will prob- 
ably not find out till afterward, perhaps long 
afterward, that you have been led at all." 
These addresses made a vivid and lasting 
impression. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 29 



CHAPTER VI 

PROVIDENCE, PURITANISM, 
AND KULTUB 

This idea of providential leading, so 
marked in all evangelical English thought, 
is a target for ridicule with the up-to- 
date philosopher and theologian. Ernst 
Troeltsch, professor of theology in the Uni- 
versity of Berlin, writing quite recently 
(1915) on the "Spirit of German Kultur" 
discusses the EngUshman's notion of 
freedom. "It is his creed," he declares, "that 
this freedom coincides with the welfare of 
the state, which he proves in puritanical 
fashion by means of Providence." We saw 
how Nietzsche threw overboard all belief 
in providential goodness ; and there has been 
a constant sneer through recent German 
literature at this reliance on God's will, this 
trust in the leadings of Providence, these 
Puritanic notions of divine authority. The 
recent short survey of "American Litera- 
ture" by Professor Leon Kellner, which 



so THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

opens with a discussion of its character, is a 
bitter attack on Puritanism and Providence. 
The two terms are well linked together, 
for Puritanism is the creed which asserts 
Eternal Providence. "Absorption in God," 
he remarks, "seems incompatible with the 
presentation of mankind. The God of the 
Puritans was in this respect too a jealous 
God who brooked no sort of creative rivalry. 
The inspired moments of the loftiest soul 
were filled with the thought of God and his 
designs; spiritual life was wholly domi- 
nated by solicitude regarding salvation, the 
hereafter, grace; how could such petty 
concerns as personal experiences of a lyric 
nature, the transports or the pangs of love, 
find utterance ? What did a lyric occurrence 
like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so 
welcome, or the first sight of the snowdrop, 
signify compared with the last Sunday's 
sermon?" 

This is neither good theology, philosophy, 
nor literature. It was a Puritan lad, train- 
ing for the ministry in one of the stricter 
Presbyterian organizations, and knowing his 
Bible first of all, who wrote the lyric on the 
Cuckoo, which was the delight of Edmund 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 31 

Burke. When the great orator went north 
to Scotland, he made it a point to visit its 
author and tell him how highly he esteemed 
the verses, unequaled in their way : 

"What time the daisy decks the green 
Thy certain voice we hear; 
Hast thou a star to guide thy path, 
And mark the rolling year? 

"Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green, 
Thy sky is ever clear; 
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song, 
No winter in thy year!" 

It is greatly to the credit of Puritan life and 
thought that in the century and a half be- 
tween Shakespeare and Burke, the cuckoo, a 
symbol of adultery and used in the drama- 
tist's plays to evoke an indecent laugh — it 
was a regular stage gag — should have be- 
come again one with nature at its best. No 
better foundation for a proper lyric sense 
than the psalms of David can well be recom- 
mended; and these were the pabulum of its 
Puritan author. We accept Professor Kell- 
ner's issue ; in place of discrediting Puritan- 
ism, it helps the cause. 



32 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER VII 

TENNYSON'S GRASP OF MODERN 
SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 

Tennyson was no smug Philistine, with 
eye, ear, and brain deaf to the onward march 
of hfe ; he was among the "shock troops" in 
the forefront of the battle of life. When 
"In Memoriam" appeared in 1851, it was a 
little ahead of the times, and was not under- 
stood for a decade except by the initiated. 
It not only handled evolution in a masterly 
way, but foreshadowed the more recent anti- 
dote to materialistic evolution known as 
pragmatism. One feature is common to 
pragmatism and the outlook of the author of 
"In Memoriam," the conception of a world 
so vast that men need not trouble over the 
practical difficulties of human immortality — 
an overpeopling of the universe. How re- 
stricted was the old idea of the world, with 
heaven just above the clouds and Hades in 
the bowels of the earth, the round world thus 
including all created beings except a few 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 33 

elect spirits! But as William James, the 
apostle of pragmatism, remarks, "the tire- 
someness of an overpeopled heaven is a 
purely subjective and illusory notion, a sign 
of human incapacity, a remnant of the old, 
narrow-hearted aristocratic creed. . . . The 
heart of being can have no exclusions akin to 
that which our poor little hearts set up." ^ 

Tennyson's world of eighty years ago had 
begun to grow and expand in an extraor- 
dinary way. It was the very year after 
Hallam's death that the electric telegraph 
superseded pigeon flights for rapid messages. 
Indeed, the record flight for carrier pigeons 
was made in Belgium the summer he died — 
a fact which may explain the recurring refer- 
ence to this mode of communication found 
in "In Memoriam," for example, in Section 
xii: 

"Lo, as a dove when up she springs, 

To bear through Heaven a tale of woe. 
Some dolorous message knit below 
The wild pulsation of her wings." 

Steamers were now crossing the Atlantic, 
and railway trains were speeding across 

^ Human Immortality, pp. 43, 44. 



34 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

islands and continents. There is an echo of 

the railway train in the lines of "Locksley 

Hall," written when Tennyson was residing 

in the neighborhood of London : 

"Not in vain the distance beckons. Forward, for- 
ward let us range, 
Let the great world spin for ever, down the ring- 
ing grooves of change." 

Science, pure and applied, was wonderfully 

active : 

"A time to sicken and to swoon, 

When Science reaches forth her arms 
> / To feel from world to world, and charms 

Her secret from the latest moon!" (Section 
XXI) 

These lines recurred to me several years ago 
when I stood with Professor Aitken at the 
foot of the great Lick telescope on Mount 
Hamilton, and he described to me the latest 
devices for "charming its secrets" from a 
heavenly body. Attached to the lower end 
of the large tube is a triangular box which 
incloses electrical apparatus delicately ad- 
justed to register two things — ^the distance 
of a star and its composition. We need not 
go into the scientific details ; it is sufficient to 
indicate the uses and value of the wonderful 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 35 

instrument — one of the most carefully ad- 
justed among all electrical appliances. I 
did, indeed, quote the lines, and as we went 
on to talk of Tennyson's intense interest in 
all things scientific he told me that Johann 
Gottfried Galle was just dead in Germany 
at the advanced age of ninety-eight. Galle 
it was who first gazed upon the planet Nep- 
tune, and set the scientific world at rest on 
the subject. The discovery took place on 
the night of September 16, 1846, in the 
Sternwarte at Berlin, where he was operator. 
At this time Tennyson was still busy with 
the composition of his great elegy, chiefly in 
the way of additions and emendations. It 
had been a Cambridge man, well known to 
Tennyson, who made the first positive state- 
ment that such a planet existed in the 
heavens. At the close of the seventeenth 
century Herschel had discovered the planet 
Uranus, and thus added one to the moving 
bodies of the celestial universe. Close obser- 
vations made by Professor John Crouch 
Adams, who had left Cambridge for Saint 
Andrew's University, revealed the fact that 
the movements of Uranus were disturbed by 
the presence of some other factor, probably 



36 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

a companion planet. A few months later, 
from independent researches, Leverrier in 
France made the same announcement. In 
England, Airy, the astronomer-royal, and 
Challis of Cambridge at once set to work to 
locate the new planet, and were narrowing 
down results to a few possibilities when Galle 
found the planet. The interest taken in the 
whole matter by Cambridge may well be 
imagined, not least by Tennyson and his set, 
who, though wrapped up in poetical, his- 
torical, philosophical, and other problems, 
breathed the atmosphere of the home of Sir 
Isaac Newton. Notwithstanding the scien- 
tific activities of the German universities be- 
fore the war, Cambridge has never ceased 
to be, in a large and high sense, the world 
home of science proper. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 37 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PROBLEM OF "IN 
MEMORIAM" 

The central problem of "In Memoriam" 
is religious and philosophic. It is a mistake 
to divorce these two terms, as if religion 
could be severed from philosophy, a mistake 
that pragmatism does not make, but which 
the Sense philosophers of the past century 
have constantly been making. Where is the 
final harmony of the universe, and what is 
meant by immortality ? Is the final harmony 
found in self-perfection? Does it consist in 
aesthetic self-satisfaction? "No," says the 
Christian thinker, "for the essence of religion 
is self-renunciation and the bowing-down to 
a higher will." In one of his stimulating 
books, Mr. Chesterton lays down some 
maxims that are well worth considering. He 
regards as one of the evil influences of our 
time the tendency to place everything in the 
present and the future, and ignore the past. 
"Eternity" is a word that reads both back- 
ward and forward; but especially to the de- 



38 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

vout man it reads backward. To know God 
is to know him in revelation and history. 
God explains the universe, and we can un- 
derstand immortahty only through him, for 
immortality reads backward. 

The great song of harmony with which 
"In Memoriam" begins, and which was writ- 
ten after the poet had passed out of the 
depths and was in the sunshine again, begins 
with the Invocation: "Strong Son of God, 
immortal Love;" that is, the love that was 
from the beginning. As Saint John has it, 
"In the beginning was the intelligence, the 
life, the light; and this — the Word — ^was 
with God and was God." The Word is that 
which gives harmony to the universe. By 
this eternal life, and by it alone, can our wills 
be understood, and to get our wills in har- 
mony with this life is to realize the end of our 
being and to consecrate them. 

From the harmony of the Invocation, rec- 
ognizing a wisdom that is not of this world 
which gives peace to the soul, we are plunged 
into the discord of the opening section. It 
implies the rejection of a cherished theory of 
existence, held by some thinker for whom the 
poet had high respect: 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 39 

*'I held it truth with him who sings 
To one clear harp in divers tones, 
That men may rise on stepping-stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things." 

Notice the past tense — "held," not "hold" — 
although the lines are often misquoted. In- 
deed, they so appear on the title page of one 
of Julia Magruder's stories (Dead Selves, 
1898), as if the statement were an assertion 
that holds good, and not a protest. The 
philosophy of life here rg|erred to as inade- 
quate and unsatisfying^ that of the German 
Goethe. It is the doctrine of self-realiza- 
tion, the completion of the pyramid of man's 
possibilities in life; as if a man's work or 
labor here were ultimate. At crises in a 
man's life he finds that he is more than his 
work, and that he must fall back on the 
springs of action and of life in order to have 
real spiritual nourishment. "That genuine 
personal work," says a recent writer, "into 
which a Goethe might have concentrated the 
powers of his soul, may come, through the 
very concentration which ennobled it, to be a 
narrow or hardening influence. 'He that 
findeth his life shall lose it.' " 



40 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CRISIS AND THE DILEMMA 

Such a crisis came in the life of Tennyson 
when his dear friend and hero, the saintly 
Hallam, was suddenly called away from 
earth. The great statesman William 
Ewart Gladstone, who was at Eton with 
Arthur Hallam, rated him extraordinarily 
high. His estimate of Hallam's noble intel- 
lectual powers and singular elevation of 
character agreed in essence with all that is 
stated in "In Memoriam." "He resembled 
a passing emanation from some other and 
less darkly checkered world" — such was his 
testimony. Was Tennyson prepared to call 
his friendship with Hallam an experience, to 
be used to help him in his personal life, and 
be gradually forgotten? Or had he here 
touched the immortal thing called Love, the 
Life Worth Living, and was this remem- 
brance to be cherished as jealously as the 
miser treasures his gold? In this friendship 
he had found the real meaning of life ; it must 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 41 

never wither and become dead. Tennyson 
rejects with disdain the phrase "dead selves" 
as unworthy. There must be no mundane, 
commercial interpretation of his ideal friend- 
ship. Note the bitter flavor he finds in the 
business terms "gain" and "interest" used in 
such a connection: 

"But who shall so forecast the years, 
And find in loss a gain to match? 
Or reach a hand through time to catch 
The far-off interest of tears ?" 

He had come to the limit of rationality and 
common sense — "everything for the best in 
the best of worlds ; or if not, grin and bear it, 
and forget/' No, he was now face to face 
with a nature which killed off her noblest off- 
spring, just when they were abgut to yield 
their legitimate fruit of influence. A bene- 
ficent nature had evidently to be rejected, 
and he was up against the fundamentals — 
the real meaning of Life, Love, Will, lying 
outside of a "blind nature," cruel and re- 
morseless, such as might suit the unfilial 
Edmund of Shakespeare's Lear (Act I, 
sc. ii). 

Notice the wild outburst of the next two 
quatrains : 



42 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

"Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned; 
Let darkness keep her raven gloss ; 
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, 
To dance with death, to beat the ground, 

"Than that the victor Hours should scorn 
The long result of Love, and boast, 
'Behold the man that loved and lost, 
But all he was is overworn.' " 

The poet here declares his willingness to give 
himself to the wildest orgies of grief, to lead 
the life of a Trappist monk, rather than have 
Time point with a triumphant and disdainful 
smile at his "dead self." To find a clue to 
the real sentiment of the passage we must 
turn to the wonderful 116th sonnet of 
Shakespeare, where the nature of love is dis- 
cussed, and where its eternal quality is in- 
sisted upon: 

"Love is not love 
Which alters when it alteration finds, 
Or bends with the remover to remove : 
O, no ! it is an ever-fixed mark. 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 
It is the star to every wandering bark, 
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be 

taken. 
Love's not Time's fool. ..." 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 43 

It is worthy of remark that in Section IV 
Tennyson so uses the word "fool": "Thou 
shalt not be the fool of loss." In this con- 
nection it may be remarked that in "In 
Memoriam" we seem to be again in the 
"friend-love" atmosphere of the spacious 
Elizabethan times, which was overshadowed 
in later Puritan times by marital love. When 
the first Lord Brooke died, he left instruc- 
tions that his monument should bear the 
simple words: "Fulke Greville, Servant to 
Queen Elizabeth, Councillor tc King James, 
and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney." The life 
he had lived with that Sir Galahad, cut off in 
his prime forty years before, remained as his 
most cherished possession. 

The first three sections of the poem 
present us with a dilemma, whose two horns 
are both distasteful, but not equally so, to the 
poet. The first horn is the more repellent. 
The outlook upon life, with his friend gone 
forever and nothing to be done but to make 
the best of his loss, is associated with a com- 
fort that is repulsive: "One will be the better 
for the experience, and raise on the old soil 
a new crop of still more valuable experi- 
ences." He refuses utterly thus to dig up 



44 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

the sacred garden of his friendship, and make 
a commercial profit out of it. The garden 
must be preserved with all care; the plants 
must not be allowed to wither. The seasons 
must not be suffered to lay it waste or make 
it desolate. But then the other horn — ^what 
of it? To live wholly in the past is to lose 
touch with the present, and make him surly 
and angry in a world which killed his great- 
est joy. He must shut himself up, so to 
speak, in a cemetery, and become a caretaker 
in the vaults of death. Nature becomes 
"a hollow form with empty hands." 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 45 



CHAPTER X 
A POSSIBLE SOLUTION 

So bleak an outlook on life was naturally 
unsatisfactory to the high-strung poet, a 
keen lover of nature. But yet it was pref- 
erable to the sordid solution just considered. 
Even Schopenhauer, the apostle of the hard 
and intolerant, who scoffs at religion and 
love, in visiting the Trappist monastery in 
Normandy, had to admit that there was 
dignity and sweetness in some of the faces 
there that haunted him. But is this con- 
tinual martyrdom of the senses a necessary 
thing? Why should flesh and blood be com- 
pelled to endure it? The solution is just 
hinted at in Sections XIII and XIV, where 
a spirit world is apprehended, the contempla- 
tion of which relieves the tension of his feel- 
ings and allows him the comfort of tears. 

Does Tennyson ever admit throughout the 
poem that the years may, or do, turn for the 
wise man the deepest loss into gain? We 
have noted the repulsion he expresses for 



46 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

the state of mind which would use and apply 
the commercial standard of debit and credit 
to so sacred a matter as the loss of his friend. 
Actually there is nothing in the remainder of 
the poem which would entitle the reader to 
make any such admission. He studiously 
avoids the use of the word "higher" in respect 
to any advance or growth made by himself. 
In the fifth stanza of the Bridal Song, after 
granting that regret is dead — his last regret 
being a sigh for that very regret — he uses 
the words : 

"For I myself with these [summers] have grown 
To something greater than before." 

"Greater," be it observed, not "higher." The 
seed sown in the five summers of companion- 
ship had sprung up, and the plant had in- 
creased ; but there was no change of quality. 
For the rest of his life the type of character 
known and loved in his friend remained the 
ideal standard of excellence. To attach the 
word "higher" to anything else, in compari- 
son with this, was to him a heresy. Note how 
he refers to his friend: 

"And dear to me as sacred wine 
To dying lips is all he said." 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 4)7 

Such passages as the above laid him open 
to the criticisms of the devout. They should, 
on the other hand, in fairness, settle the ques- 
tion whether he ever dreamed of "rising on 
his dead self to higher things." 

The pastor of a leading congregation in 
one of our great cities was taking a class 
through "In Memoriam." He set out to 
show how every loss may be turned into gain 
if the sufferer has the right spirit; that this 
is the way to build up our lives. I warned 
him that he was striking a wrong note for 
the interpretation of "In Memoriam"; but 
he differed from me. In a few weeks, how- 
ever, he was convinced, by actual experience 
in teaching, that my objections were valid; 
that the conventional interpretation would 
not work. A lover of truth, he has since 
risen to prominence in the church. 

On one occasion, the most dramatic in his 
life, the English statesman George Canning 
declared on the floor of the House of Com- 
mons : "I call on a New World to redress the 
balance of the old." Though the cause of 
hberalism seemed hopeless in Europe, with 
the mighty forces arrayed against it, repub- 
lics were rising across the Atlantic imbued 



48 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

with the spirit of progress; and on these he 
counted for final victory. There is a similar 
change of base noticeable in "In Memoriam." 
It alters the value of the terms in which the 
two cases of the dilemma are expressed. 
His friend is no longer dead, but a living 
occupant of another and better world. 
Again, the world is no longer the mere world 
of phenomena with no outlet beyond the 
vaults of death. These vaults open to a 
world of reality, the eternal world of spirit. 
The solution of the dilemma, then, consists in 
rejecting the terms in which the two cases, or 
horns, are expressed. Death, treated as a 
final boundary in the mundane vocabulary of 
the first case, comes to be regarded as a mere 
passage or ford to something beyond. The 
point of that horn is thus blunted. The world 
of phenomena which his loss rendered hateful 
to him because it seemed under the sway of 
cruelty and injustice, became a mere obscure 
corner in the great, bright universe of God. 
And the point of the second horn is equally 
blunted. 

At Sections XIII and XIV, as already 
said, we receive vague hints of the solution. 
The melting into tears is a significant and 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 49 

helpful sign — as in his lyric, "Home they 
brought her warrior dead." Up to that time 
there was a stony grief. It removes a dis- 
location, and effects a junction with the 
world of sense. Section XXVII closes with 
a note of resignation. For twenty-seven 
sections the poet has been in the depths of 
sadness and despair, and the only palliative 
left to him is the maxim of the pagan Seneca : 
'^Magis gauderes quod hahueras, quam 
moereres quod amiseras'' — 

" 'Tis better to have loved and lost, 
Than never to have loved at all." 



60 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XI 

THE "WINGS OF FAITH" 

With the Christmas bells came Christmas 
hope and faith. Not through argument 
delivered from the pulpit, however, nor 
through exhortation, nor mystically through 
ritual, but through the simpler channel of 
consecrated lives. It is strange that so few 
writers on *'In Memoriam" should see the 
extraordinary significance of Section XXX. 
It really marks a crisis in the poet's life, 
when he definitely ranges himself with be- 
lievers, the devout women of his family, who 
got into touch with heaven through song: 

"We ceased: a gentler feeling crept 
Upon us : surely rest is meet : 
'They rest,' we said, 'their sleep is sweet,' 
And silence followed, and we wept. 

"Our voices took a higher range ; 

Once more we sang : 'They do not die 
Nor lose their mortal sympathy. 
Nor change to us, although they change. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM'* 51 

" *Rapt from the fickle and the frail 

With gathered power, yet the same, 
Pierces the keen seraphic flame 
From orb to orb, from veil to veil.' " 

The closing quatrain is significant as show- 
ing his change of mood : 

"Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn, 

Draw forth the cheerful day from night: 
O Father, touch the east, and light 
The light that shone when Hope was born." 

The Lord Jesus brought life and inunor- 
tality to light ; and faith in him immediately 
brings hope. It is the same hope that is giv- 
ing peaceful ecstasy to the singers, one of 
whom has lost her lover and earthly pros- 
pects of a happy home. 

The modern mystic Maurice Maeterlinck 
has a significant passage in his The Treasure 
of the Humble which bears out this interpre- 
tation. "For women," he states in "On 
Woman," "are indeed the veiled sisters of 
all the great things we do not see. They are 
indeed nearest of kin to the infinite that is 
about us, and they alone can still smile at it 
with the intimate grace of the child, to whom 
its father inspires no fear. It is they who 
preserve here below the pure fragrance of 



5^ THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

our soul, like some jewel from heaven, which 
none know how to use; and were they to 
depart, the spirit would reign in solitude in 
a desert." 

The thought occurred to me, in examining 
the lines critically, that the melodists must 
have been singing a definite hymn; and it 
seemed worth while to discover what were 
the words which had inspired them. It will 
be hard, I think, to find verses which suit the 
conditions so satisfactorily as a familiar 
hymn of Dr. Isaac Watts, teacher in song 
of God's providence and love. The use of 
the word "veiF' furnishes a clue, and the 
whole imagery is congenial: 

"Give me the wings of faith to rise 
Within the veil, and see 
The saints above, how great their joys. 
How bright their glories be. 

"Once they were mourners here below. 
And poured out cries and tears ; 
They wrestled hard, as we do now. 
With sins, and doubts, and fears. 

**I ask them whence their victory came, 
They, with united breath, 
Ascribe their conquest to the Lamb, 
Their triumph to his death. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 53 

"They marked the footsteps that he trod, 
His zeal inspired their breast ; 
And, following their incarnate God, 
Possess the promised rest. 

"Our glorious Leader claims our praise 
For his own pattern given; 
While the long cloud of witnesses 
Show the same path to heaven." 

The second stanza has been omitted in 
some hymnals, as if it struck a jarring note; 
but it suits well with the situation. Hallam 
had passed through doubts and struggles be- 
fore he came out triumphant: 

"He fought his doubts and gathered strength; 
He would not make his judgment blind. 
He faced the spectres of the mind 
And laid them : thus he came at length 

"To find a stronger faith his own ; 

And Power was with him in the night" (Sec- 
tion XCVI). 



54 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XII 
THE BARRIER "VEIL" 

An indication that it was Dr. Watts's 
hymn which was sung at that sad Christmas 
time is the phrase that appears in the first 
stanza, "within the veil." It estabhshes a 
bond of sympathy between Tennyson and 
Isaac Watts, across a whole century. 

Watts took the term out of the theological 
field, and gave it to the religion of the home. 
Tennyson widened its scope by extending its 
use to the philosophy of common life ; always 
basing it on behef in a heaven, beyond the 
veil. "Crossing the Bar" is "passing within 
the veil." With Fitzgerald, in his "Rubai- 
yat," the term thins into a mere acceptance 
of the mystery of life and death. And to- 
day, in popular usage, it has almost lost a 
specific reference to heaven. 

The poet's close acquaintance with Holy 
Writ is shown in his use of "veil" in the 
plural. The writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews speaks of the "second veil, the tab- 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 55 

ernacle which is called the Holiest of all." 
In "The Two Voices," written during the 
period of storm and stress which followed 
Hallam's death, Tennyson has the word in 
the plural: 

"He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend, 
And through thick veils to apprehend 
A labor working to an end." 

So also, in the verse from Section XXX 
akeady quoted, he refers to more than one 
veil: 

"Pierces the keen seraphic flame 
From orb to orb, from veil to veil." 

But in the later use of the word in the poem, 
at Section LVI, where the whole argument 
is passionately smnmed up, the word is in the 
singular. He fails to see final law in a 
nature that can be cruel and capricious, care- 
ful only of the type, ruthless to the indi- 
vidual; and he calls for a higher law of the 
spirit: 

"O life as futile, then, as frail 1 

O for thy voice to soothe and bless! 
What hope of answer or redress? 
Behind th^ veil, behind th^ y^jl," 



56 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

The use of the word "veil," in a metaphor- 
ical sense, comes into the language with Tin- 
dale's Version of the New Testament, which 
appeared in 1526, and later versions fol- 
lowed him. The passages in Hebrews where 
it is so used will be found at the close of the 
sixth and in later chapters. The imagery is 
taken from the furniture of the temple, 
where the Holy of holies was guarded by a 
veil, into which the high priest went alone 
every year, "not without blood, which he 
offered for himself, and for the errors of the 
people." Christ, by his death, "the shed- 
ding of his own blood," entered as High 
Priest, "not into the holy place made with 
hands, which are the figures of the true, but 
into heaven itself." This is the foundation 
of the Christian faith, "which hope we have 
as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stead- 
fast, and which entereth into that within the 
veil" (Heb. 6. 19). 

Dr. Watts seems to have been the first to 
use the term "veil" of the shrouded passage 
into heaven, not with specific reference to 
Christ and his sacrificial work, but as apply- 
ing to all believers. To Hteralists at the 
time the usage may have appeared bold and 



OF «IN MEMORIAM" 57 

unwarranted, and there are seemingly no in- 
stances of its literary use until Tennyson's, 
in "In Memoriam," of the barrier or bourne 
of life, leading to the heaven beyond. There- 
after it becomes common. Seven years 
afterward, Edward Fitzgerald, the poet's 
lifelong friend, uses the term twice in his 
"Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam: 

"There was the door to which I found no key, 
There was the Veil, through which I might not 
see; 
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee 
There was — and then no more of Thee and Me." 

And again: 

"When you and I behind the Veil are past." 

And so it has passed into general use ; has 
become "current coin." Our ordinary in- 
terpretation of immortality is an immediate 
transference to heaven ; a heaven that has no 
change nor progress. Tennyson is not sat- 
isfied with this ideal. He supposes the im- 
mortal spirit, "the keen seraphic flame" — to 
paraphrase the above two stanzas — snatched 
away from its unstable and mean earthly 
surroundings, and proceeding from one 
world to another in God's great universe, 



68 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

waxing ever nobler, yet never losing its 
identity. In the vision of Section CIII, his 
friend appears "thrice as large as man." A 
consideration of his views on immortality 
will come later, with sections that deal di- 
rectly with the subject. 






OF "IN MEMORIAM" 59 



CHAPTER XIII 
IDEAL FAITH AND LOVE 

We are now definitely in the Christian 
domain. The next section after the thirtieth 
begins with a contemplation of the conse- 
crated life of faith and love, of which the 
New Testament type is Mary, "whose eyes 
are homes of silent prayer." The Master is 
her hero, her "life," and she is satisfied. In 
her the human and the divine have inexplic- 
ably met. Tennyson encountered the same 
phenomenon in his own sisters, and it con- 
vinced him once for all that the fundamentals 
of our life, the things worth living for, re- 
main matters of simple faith, not within the 
domain of our analytic powers. The solu- 
tion of life is "behind the veil." 

The other great Puritan poem, Milton's 
"Paradise Lost," makes the decision of the 
woman the undoing of her too trustful 
husband. Eve leads Adam on the wrong 
path; her "will" dominates. Is not the as- 
sertion of will ^§ something particularly to 



60 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

be cherished rather effeminate and childish 
than manly or womanly in the better sense? 
It has been the peculiar temptation of 
women in the past, raised to power with no 
adequate training in judgment and tem- 
perance. The temper of the German people, 
taught in the school of "will-to-power," has 
been strangely childish and undignified; 
often pure "bad temper." Their cult of 
hate has been worthy only of an ill-tempered 
miss or scowling schoolboy. Milton makes 
his Adam carefully guard the free will of his 
wife; he left the decision of her actions to 
herself: 

*'I warned thee ; I admonished thee. 

Beyond this had been force; 
And force upon free will hath here no place." 

Eve fell, but they repented and began life to- 
gether; she became his true partner. The 
women of Tennyson's family, Puritan-bred, 
are true partners in his life ; and their accept- 
ance unmurmuringly of the divine dispensa- 
tion, which bore so hard on one of their 
number, had a healing effect on his wounded 
spirit, and led him into faith and peace. 
Nietzsche's philosophy of life reduced 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 61 

woman to quite a subordinate place, away 
from initiative in conduct outside of merely 
domestic affairs. The woman who loves, ac- 
cording to his creed, must give herself up 
entirely to the man, who in his turn must 
accept this gift manfully ; "so wills it the law 
of love, a law which is at times tragic and 
painful, and places the barrier of an insur- 
mountable antagonism between the two 
sexes. ''^ Here he brings in the ugly and 
intrusive distinction of sex in the spiritual 
realm, where it has no vital place. Tenny- 
son's ideal of love is the sound Puritan and 
Pauline conception based on the thirteenth 
chapter of First Corinthians, applying 
equally to man and woman. To keep it 
from the taint of sex passion, the translators 
of the King James version had to translate 
the Greek agape by "charity", but the com- 
plete partnership in religious and other mat- 
ters set up in the Puritan home entirely 
removed the objection, and the Revised 
Version replaced the colder and weaker word 
by the warmer and stronger "love." The 
law of love as understood by Tennyson can 
never place any "antagonism between the 

*The Gospel of Superman, p. 144. 



62 THE SI>IRITUAL MEANING 

two sexes"; the phrase is unmeaning. It is 
a vital force which is far wider in its scope ! 
than merely family life: 

"Love is and was my King and Lord, 
And will be, tho' as yet I keep 
Within his court on earth, and sleep 
Encompassed by his faithful guard, 

*'And hear at times a sentinel 

Who moves about from place to place 
And whispers to the worlds of space, 
In the deep night, that all is well." 

This reduction of the functions of woman in 
Germany to the three K's, Kinder, Kiiche, 
Kirche — and Nietzsche knocks out the last 
as foolishness — ^has been one of the causes of 
the downfall of the German empire. While 
in France, England, and America the 
women have acted as partners of the men, 
helping to infuse a warm humanitarianism 
into the social and political life, German 
women, confining their outlook to the family 
outfit and the family larder, and regarding 
"war" as the proper function of men, with 
rules of its own, have been grossly defective 
in kindliness and decency. They welcomed 
the war as likely to bring good times and 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 63 

prosperity, conformed their ethics entirely 
to the brutal creed of the Junkers, and 
treated prisoners of war with a spiteful 
hatred which they mistook for patriotism. 
It is a miserable story of dwarfed education. 
Equally it may be said that the manly atti- 
tude and manly capacity shown by the 
women of England and France (using 
"manly" as a nonsexual term, implying a 
well-rounded human being and citizen) have 
given an extraordinary strength to these 
warring countries. It is impossible to read 
"In Memoriam" with due appreciation if we 
inject any supercilious sex distinction into 
our interpretation. 

With Nietzsche, while love for a woman is 
merely a passing episode in a man's life, he 
supposes a higher love, which he regards as 
preeminently spiritual, a love for great prob- 
lems. "For all great problems," he de- 
clares, "great love is necessary; and only 
minds which are strong, robust, sure, and 
solidly built on their foundations are capable 
of such love." In place of persons to love, 
he gives us abstractions; the old fallacy of 
the utilitarians which made happiness the 
end of hfe. Intellectual abstractions are 



64 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

will-o'-the-wisps when human love is con- 
cerned; they will never take the place of 
the old humanities of father, mother, wife, 
brother and sister, friend, lover and fellow 
countryman. The same fallacy is present 
in the teaching of Tolstoy, and is producing 
grievous results to-day. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 65 



CHAPTER XIV 

MISCONCEPTIONS OF "IN 
MEMORIAM" 

At the time the poem was published re- 
ligious people were still thinking in terms 
of Milton, with his fiat creation in which time 
and process had little or no concern. For 
instance, in "Paradise Lost" we are told that 
the Eternal Son moved into space with a 
pair of golden compasses, and forthwith the 
circular firmament, with concentric plane- 
tary circles, took shape, a globular earth at 
its center. The earth was peopled as by a 
magic wand: 

"The grassy clods now calved ; now half appeared 
The tawny lion, pawing to get free 
His hinder parts." 

Rossetti's "Blessed Damosel," published the 
very same year as "In Memoriam," remains 
Miltonic and mediaeval in its phraseology 
and conceptions. But Tennyson thinks and 



ee THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

speaks through modern conceptions of slow, 
eternal process : 

"Ionian music measuring out 
The steps of Time." 

He conceives of his lost friend as still moving 
and growing and developing; not as gazing 
down restfuUy "from the gold bar of 
heaven" or singing in the heavenly choir. 
For a considerable time the thought and 
phraseology of "In Memoriam" lay outside 
of the grasp of the orthodox. In so far as it 
touched cosmic matters, it was deemed a 
little dangerous and unsettling. 

Positivists, again, who were quite a power 
when Tennyson was writing, with their 
fondness for intellectual abstractions, failed 
to understand the whole drift of the poem. 
When the Positivist Taine wrote his History 
of English Literature fifty years ago, and it 
was translated into English in three portly 
volumes, it was hailed in university quarters 
as the best thing of the kind. To-day it is 
on the collateral shelf. Taine's Positivism, 
indeed, rendered him unable to grasp the 
real value and drift of either Milton or Ten- 
nyson — a vital defect. With religion re- 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 67 

garded not as something final in life, but as 
a phase of civilization through which hu- 
manity has passed on its way to the goal of 
exact truth, how could poems like "Paradise 
Lost" or "In Memoriam" be grasped? 
Here is Taine's estimate of the latter : 

" 'In Memoriam' is cold, monotonous, and 
often too prettily arranged. The poet goes 
into mourning ; but like a correct gentleman, 
with brand new gloves, wipes away his tears 
with a cambric handkerchief, and displays 
throughout the religious service, which ends 
the ceremony, all the compunction of a re- 
spectful and well-trained layman. He was 
to find his subjects elsewhere." How dif- 
ferent from the criticism of that incisive 
poet and thinker, Edward Fitzgerald, of 
"Rubaiyat" fame, who considered that after 
"In Memoriam" and "Maud," Tennyson 
wrote almost nothing of final significance. 

A writer in a recent issue of Blackwood's 
Magazine, dealing with the Victorian age 
(August, 1918), clings to Taine's estimate: 
"Dickens's touch with his own age, his 
sermons and his theses, will fade away as 
surely as the philosophy of Tennyson will 
fade away." 



68 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

One reason why Tennyson is so often mis- 
understood and discounted to-day lies in the 
antagonism he proclaimed to the doctrine 
which has permeated our thought in the past 
century, and is dominant in up-to-date eco- 
nomical treatises. The Pauline ethics, in 
establishing a higher law which must rule the 
Christian life, gave a value to the terms 
"gain" and "loss" which differed from the 
ordinary value given to them by the world. 
"What things were gain to me," says Paul, 
"these I counted loss for Christ." And so his 
gospel was a stumbling-block to the Jews, and 
foolishness to the Greeks. We know from his 
biography how close a student of Paul was 
Tennyson ; how much he valued such a book 
as Jowett's Commentary on the Epistle to 
the Romans. Exactly as Paul does, he re- 
jects the selfish interpretation of "gain" and 
"loss" when applied to the things of the 
spirit. He uses a word that had not in 
Paul's time its present vital force, the word 
"interest" — a coldly commercial term since 
banking became a power in the world. Note 
again the intense disgust — disgust at the 
complacent sordidness of the "practical" 
man — ^^expressed in the quatrain: 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 69 

"But who shall so forecast the years 
And find in loss a gain to match? 
Or reach a hand through time to catch 
The f ar-ofF interest of tears ?" 

A commercial vocabulary is wholly out of 
place in such a discussion, and jars on the 
wounded soul. What himian being is in a 
position to reckon up gain and loss in this 
mercantile fashion? Can man, frail man, 
afford to make such a calculation respecting 
future gain? When dealing with Life and 
the Soul, we deal with eternity, and enter the 
domain of a higher law. 

Kultur in all its forms and aspects rejects 
such a higher law. The enlightened super- 
man is a law unto himself in the unrestricted 
development of his powers; the enlightened 
state makes its own morality. Unprincipled 
commercialism may become as deadly a foe 
to humanity as unprincipled autocracy. 
Kultur may be defined as "civilization built 
on the principle of enlightened selfishness." 
It became a world-menace in Germany, ow- 
ing to the ill-fated combination made be- 
tween a powerful military caste and an effi- 
cient industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, 
both partisans of the creed. In overthrow- 



70 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

ing the military machine, the nations have by- 
no means destroyed all the evil conditions in 
Germany. The whole civilization has been 
built on selfishness. The virus of a low- 
pitched theory of life had entered deeply into 
the soul of the German business man, who as 
long as the men in shining armor brought 
him victories and spoil was as coldly selfish 
as von Hindenburg himself. And our own 
democracy has to be on its guard against the 
same peril. Those who fail to see the drift 
of Tennyson's teaching in these resonant 
lines are on the same side of the fence with 
Kultur, Christ and immortality have the 
final say regarding "gain" and "loss" when 
these terms are applied to the soul's welfare. 
This is the basal teaching of "In Me- 
moriam." 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 71 



CHAPTER XV 

GEORGE ELIOT'S UNSATISFAC- 
TORY CREED 

A CONTEMPORARY frankly on the other 
side from Tennyson in all the deeper issues 
of life was George Eliot. Brought up in a 
strict evangelicalism, she went over in early 
life to the doctrines of positivism, and ac- 
cepted a law working alike for nature and 
man. A woman above narrow egotism, she 
allowed the claims of theory to dominate her 
spirit, and asserted herself logically as an 
unbeliever both in speech and in conduct. 
Whereas Tennyson, at a critical moment in 
his life, underwent a revival, a "warming up" 
of his earlier instincts — the significance of 
the term is often lost — George Eliot made 
the fatal mistake of breaking with traditions 
of holy Christian marriage by entering into 
a union with a man already married, who 
happened to have an incompatible partner. 
The noblest character she portrays in all 
her novels is Dinah Morris, the devout 
Methodist, patterned after her own aunt, 



n THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

Such a step as the Lewes haison at once 
severed relations with her early friends of 
this type, and made the rest of her life, in- 
stead of communion and fellowship, mere 
bitter-sweet reminiscence. Take away the 
delights of reminiscence from George Eliot's 
studies and there is little of value left. One 
is reminded of the mariner in Roscoe's ad- 
mirable sonnet: 

"And as the leaning mariner, his hand 

Clasped on his oar, strives trembling to reclaim 
Some loved lost echo from the fleeting strand. 
So lean I back to the poetic land ; 

And in my heart a sound, a voice, a name 
Hangs, as above the lamp hangs the expiring 
flame." 

The glory of life for her lies entirely in the 
past, a glory all the time growing dimmer. 
She has focused it for us intellectually in her 
wonderful novels, but she was herself untrue 
to the life that gave warmth and reality to 
the characters she depicts. Indeed, she went 
definitely over the fence into the new faith 
of Submission to Natural Law. While 
Tennyson declares that, 

"If Death were seen 
At first as Death, Love had not been," 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 73 

George Eliot pens perhaps the finest of her 
poems, "The Legend of Jubal," to prove 
that the cahn acceptance of death as a merg- 
ing into nature reveals the meaning of love. 
Jubal had given music to humanity, and 
could die happy, although his friends re- 
jected and maltreated him: 

"The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky, 
While Jubal lonely laid him down to die. 
He said within his soul, 'This is the end : 
O'er all the earth to where the heavens bend 
And hem man's travel, I have breathed my soul : 
I lie here now, the remnant of that whole, 
The embers of a life, a lonely pain ; 
As far-off rivers to my thirst were vain. 
So of my mighty years naught comes to me 
again. 

" 'Is the day sinking? Softest coolness springs 
From something round me : dewy shadowy wings 
Inclose me all around — no, not above — 
Is moonlight there? I see a face of love. 
Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong: 
Yea — art thou come again to me, great 
Song?' 



» 



Jubal's immortality was to live in the souls 
of others who would enjoy his music; his 
own personality was lost: 



74 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

"He heard more faintly and more faintly knew, 
Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave, 
The All-creating Presence for his grave." 

In the extraordinary fondness for abstrac- 
tion characteristic of the Positivist school of 
thinking, love itself is here divested of per- 
sonality and allied to an abstraction, song. 
The process, indeed, of George Eliot's career 
is from personality based on religious belief 
— tied up, it may be, with much that was 
outworn and unreasonable — ^to an intellectu- 
alism that lost itself in abstractions and 
evaded the final issues of life. Her immor- 
tality is conceived in terms of fame, char- 
acterized by Milton as "that last infirmity 
of noble mind." It is so enunciated in her 
creed-chant, "O May I Join the Choir In- 
visible": 

"O may I join the choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In minds made better by their presence : live 
In pulses stirred to generosity, 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
For miserable aims that end in self. 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like 

stars, 
And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
To vaster issues," 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 75 

And so on. There is no realization, in this 
delightful dreaming, of life as a warfare with 
sin, of the evil inherent in nature, of the 
divine law that prohibits such acts as her 
"marriage," as she called it, to George 
Henry Lewes, who became her "beloved 
husband." It has been justified by her 
"need of some one to lean upon"; or, again, 
"Without his insight into literary faculty, 
and his sustaining sympathy, it is doubtful 
whether she would have produced the writ- 
ings which have made her fame." And is 
not fame the only immortality? 

Lewes, while a brilliant thinker and 
writer, whose Life and Works of Goethe 
(1855) was for long the best biography of 
the great German, had but little of the re- 
hgious in his make-up, and often shocked 
pure-minded men with his loose tongue. 

There is a pathetic story of a conversation 
George Eliot had with the Cambridge 
scholar and writer, Frederic W. H. Myers, 
who devoted his life to a search for the bases 
of human immortality. His first book was 
a poem, "St. Paul," and he has given us an 
excellent Life of Wordsworth; but his 
magnum opus is his Human PersonaUty and 



76 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

Its Survival of Bodily Death, published 
posthumously in 1903. He tells us in one of 
his Essays Classical and Modern how once 
at Cambridge he walked with the novelist in 
the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an eve- 
ning of rainy May : 

"She, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, 
and taking as her text the three words which 
have been used so often as the inspiring 
trumpet-call of men — the words God, Im- 
mortahty, Duty — pronounced with terrible 
earnestness how inconceivable was the first, 
how unbelievable the second, and yet how 
peremptory and absolute the third. Never, 
perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the 
sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompens- 
ing Law. I listened, and night fell, her 
grave majestic countenance turned toward 
me like a sibyl's in the gloom; it was as 
though she withdrew from my grasp, one by 
one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me 
the third scroll only, awful with inevitable 
fate. And when we stood at length and 
parted, amid that columnar circuit of the 
forest trees, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus 
at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty 
halls — on a sanctuary with no Presence to 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 77 

hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God." 
How clear and unmistakable the issue! 

Tennyson has dealt in his "In Memoriam" 
with the ruinous effect on personality of 
making the desire for immortality in letters 
or otherwise justify any infraction of moral 
conduct. Like Milton, he would regard 
such a lapse as infinitely to be regretted: a 
mark of "infirmity": 

"We pass ; the path that each man trod 
Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds: 
What fame is left for human deeds 
In endless age? It rests with God. 

"O hollow wraith of dying fame, 
Fade wholly, while the soul exults, 
And self-infolds the large results 
Of force that would have forged a name" 
(Section LXXIII). 

The immortality of fame is uncertain and 
vanishing ; the poet's 

"Deepest lays are dumb. 
Before the mouldering of a yew; 

"And if the matin songs that woke 
The darkness of our planet, last, 
Thine own shall wither in the vast, 
Ere half the lifetime of an oak. 



78 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

"Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers 
With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain ; 
And what are they when these remain 
The ruin'd shells of hollow towers?" 

On this same subject — the "subjective im- 
mortality" of the Comtists — the poet wrote 
in a private letter, dated 1886: "I should say 
as Napoleon is reported to have said. When 
some one was urging upon him how much 
more glorious was the immortality of a great 
artist, a painter, for instance, than that of a 
great soldier, he asked how long the best 
painted and best preserved picture would 
last. *About eight hundred years.' 'Bah, 
telle immortalite/ " 



OP "IN MEMORIAM'' 79 



CHAPTER XVI 

THOMAS HARDY'S GRIM 
PESSIMISM 

A MODERN writer who grimly faces the 
situation hke Tennyson, but returns a differ- 
ent answer, is Thomas Hardy, poet and 
novelist. He gives up — says "Kamerad!" 
— ^to Time and the "Victor Hours." He 
contemplates life in what appears to him to 
be its practical aspect; and he advises his 
readers to accept calmly the inevitable. One 
of his Wessex Tales — a simple enough nar- 
rative in itself — has a terrible significance. 
Its title is "Fellow-Townsmen," and it tells 
the story of two men's lives. One is happily 
wedded; the other, having married a fashion- 
able wife who cares nothing for him, is miser- 
able. A boating accident occurs, and the 
dearly loved wife is drowned, while the 
woman whose only destiny in life seems to 
make her husband miserable, is rescued from 
death. In the excess of his grief, the be- 
reaved husband intends to erect over her 
grave the most elaborate of tombstones. 



80 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

The architect whom he consulted regarded 
his notions as extravagant. But as the 
months passed by his grief subsided; the 
cares of life began to press on him. By the 
close of the year he "has so reduced design 
after design, that the whole thing," so the 
architect reports, "has been but waste labor 
for me; till in the end it has become a com- 
mon headstone, which a mason put up in half 
a day." Here we have a case of the triumph 
of the "Victor Hours." 

In one of his poems, "A Sign Seeker," 
Hardy confesses to having given up the 
search for heavenly consolation, which 
brought Tennyson into the light: 

"There are who, rapt to heights of tranced trust, 
These tokens claim to feel and see, 
Read radiant hints of time to be — 
Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust. 

"Such scope is granted not my powers indign, 
I have lain in dead men's beds, have walked 
The tombs of those with whom I'd talked. 
Called many a gone and goodby to shape a sign, 

"And panted for response. But none replies; 
No warnings loom, nor whisperings 
To open out my limitings. 
And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls 
he lies." 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 81 



CHAPTER XVII 

TENNYSON ON THE "WORD" 

Tennyson^s goal in all his discussions is 
neither abstract truth, nor human happiness, 
nor power, but the complete life. He is 
here at one with Plato, whose whole phil- 
osophy starts from and returns to the per- 
sonality of his friend and master Socrates. 
Take away Socrates's life and death from 
Plato's scheme of things, and the bottom 
goes out. It is no wonder that Nietzsche 
has so slight an estimate of the great and 
good Athenian, whose interpretation of 
values differed radically from his own. He 
sensed an opponent: "The normal man is 
put on guard by his reason against the errors 
of his instinct; the instinct — ^that familiar 
*demon' whose voice he sometimes heard — 
warned him of the errors of his logic! . . . 
Of a less noble character than the Greeks of 
the tragic epoch, he could nevertheless fas- 
cinate his contemporaries by the superiority 
of his dialectics : he bade adieu to life calmly. 



a^ THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

without regrets, confirming by his death his 
unshaken faith in his ideas and serene opti- 
mism." So Henri Liehtenberger sums up 
the German's estimate of Socrates; and the 
editor, Mr. J. M. Kennedy, adds a foot- 
note to the effect that "Nietzsche became 
more and more hostile to Socrates as time 
went on. He saw in him the plebeian and 
decadent type, presenting as he did a great 
contrast to the aristocratic type of the tragic' 
age overflowing with vital strength."^ 

Having established in the thirtieth and the 
following sections that simple Christian faith 
is the clue to life, making it worth living, the 
poet goes on in the thirty-sixth section to 
deal with the great Christian doctrine of the 
Word, the Logos, the divine intention which 
explains this sin-stricken world and assures a 
final goal of human brotherhood ; a Christian 
doctrine developed from Plato, to whom this 
world could only be really explained by an- 
other, the eternal home of life and peace. In 
this connection he brings in the noble work 
of modern missions, a subject in which he 
took a live interest. In missionary labors 
we have the spreading of the Word. 

' * The Gospel of Superman, p. 54, 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 83 

That prince of missionaries John Wil- 
liams, the martyr of Eromanga, was in the 
midst of his labors in the islands of the 
Pacific when Hallam's short life came to a 
close. His last visit home was made when 
Tennyson was living in the neighborhood of 
London, and among the crowded audiences 
he addressed at Exeter Hall no doubt the 
poet was to be found. The thirty-sixth sec- 
tion exactly describes the labors of Williams, 
teacher, carpenter, boat-builder, comrade, 
friend, bringing an ideal of humanity to 
these wild islanders : 

"And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds. 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought ; 

"Which he may read who binds the sheaf. 
Or builds the house, or digs the grave. 
And those wild eyes that watch the wave 
In roarings round the coral reef." 

The time at which this section was written, 
as well as the poet's mood and habit, indicate 
that he came probably directly into touch 
with the noble character and ideals of John 
Williams. 



84 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

So much for Tennyson's interpretation of 
the Word. There follows a series of sec- 
tions dealing with the whole problem of im- 
mortality; which is essentially Life in its 
fuller cosmic interpretation, and the "king- 
pin" of the Christian faith. Here Tennyson 
is in full accord with that great Oxford 
teacher and thinker, John Ruskin, who in 
the best of his addresses. The Mystery of 
Life and its Arts, when telling his hearers 
that they came to hear about the Art of this 
world, was grieved with their apathy re- 
garding the Life of the next. "Are you sure 
of the promised heaven?" he inquires. "Or 
if not sure, do any of us care to make it 
sure? And if not, how can anything that 
we do be right — ^how can anything we think 
be wise? what honor can there be in the arts 
that amuse us, or what profit in the posses- 
sions that please?" 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 85 



CHAPTER XVIII 

LIFE AND IMMORTALITY 

Tennyson discusses life in the spiritual 
and higher sense under at least six aspects. 
There is the ideal life here of insight, love, 
and sympathy, which he found in a mar- 
velous fashion in Hallam. When he was 
with his friend, Tennyson seemed truly to 
live, and he capitalizes the noun to give the 
term an ideal meaning: 

"I know that this was Life — the track 
Whereon with equal feet we fared." 

To continue to exist on a lower level would 
be a constant degradation. If the eye of 
Providence were to see such a life as in store 
for himself, 

"In more of life true life no more 
And Love the indifference to be," 

then the poet hopes and longs for death. 
Without the divine spark kept alive and 
bright in a man's soul, he has no reason for 



86 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

existence. This divinity in his friend on 
some occasions seemed to flash forth when 
he spoke, 

"The rapt oration flowing free 

To those conclusions when we saw; 
The God within him light his face." 

When with his friend Hallam, Tennyson 
seemed to himself to grasp immortahty as an 
inherent element of the soul, Life with a 
capital L. To many believers, immortality 
remains merely a hope, something that the 
future holds in its lap. Others, with a wider 
sweep, have sought to realize an immortality 
that was, and is, and is to come; among 
whom was "Plato, the wise, first of those who 
know." It was his great master Socrates 
who, during the hours preceding his tragic 
death, discoursed on the life of the soul, and 
found that reminiscence was necessary 
for its proper understanding. And so he 
postulated preexistence. In the reaction 
against a Rousseau nature-worship of a mon- 
istic kind, the poet Wordsworth became 
a distinct dualist, claiming for man an 
"inward %ht" that comes from a divine 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 87 

source. He reverted to the Platonic doc- 
trine of reminiscence as affording a clue to 
the mystery of life, and embodied his 
thoughts in his incomparable "Intimations of 
Immortality from Recollections of Child- 
hood," one of the great poems of the world. 
It really gave the high tone to spiritual 
thinking in the poetry of the nineteenth 
century, rescuing thought from the flat self- 
complacency of the previous epoch. 

At this time there was a general revolt from 
the too-harsh Calvinism which had posited 
the damnation of infants as a necessity of the 
doctrine of original sin. If infant damna- 
tion is a tenet that we are bound to hold, then 
there is no room for Wordsworth's applica- 
tion of Plato's doctrine. Its supporters 
claim for childhood a peculiar charm, as 
fragrant with the blessedness of the eternal. 
A babe, it has been well said, is the most 
precious bundle that arms may carry. The 
"baby new to earth and sky" of Tennyson's 
forty-fifth section is a link with eternal bless- 
edness, not with evil. Platonic idealists like 
to believe with Wordsworth that 

"Trailing clouds of glory do we come 
. From God whg is our bom?j" 



88 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

and that "Heaven lies about us in our 
infancy." 

To find a like philosophy in English 
poetry we must go back to Henry Vaughan, 
a Platonist of the seventeenth century, whose 
ardent wish it was that he could carry child- 
hood through later life. His lines begin- 
ning, 

"Happy those early days, when I 
Shined in my angel-infancy," 

are well known. In a poem entitled "Child- 
hood," he addresses it as an 

"Age of mysteries ! which he 
Must live twice that would God's face see." 

It would seem as if Vaughan interpreted this 
new birth as a recurrence to the blessedness 
of childhood, when God is very near to us. 

Wordsworth has expressly stated that he 
did not wish the statements of the Ode to be 
considered as a piece of systematic teaching. 
On its theological side he meant his words to 
suggest and inspire, and not to enter the do- 
main of dogma. Like Tennyson, he hesi- 
tated to "linger in the Master's field, and 
darken sanctities with song." Both poets 
were nurtured in the same university, which 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 89 

in the seventeenth century had been the home 
of Platonism. Cambridge also had been the 
center of Puritan teaching, with a dogma- 
tism resting on Holy Writ. The two move- 
ments were to blend in a sane orthodoxy, 
which called in the aid of sound old meta- 
physic and modern science to uphold the 
faith once delivered to the saints. This 
wide grasp of thought in general, so pecu- 
liarly manifest in the author of "In Me- 
moriam," gives the poem its unequaled 
weight and strength. 



90 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XIX 

IMMORTALITY AND THE 
BODILY FRAME 

At the time "In Memoriam" was written, 
its outlook on life, its up-to-date theology, 
its very vocabulary were new and difficult 
to grasp by the ordinary reader and thinker. 
It preceded Darwin's book nearly a decade, 
and yet the later book had a more immediate 
effect on thought and language. Before 
twenty years were gone the word "evolution" 
had so entered the common vocabulary 
that people began to think through its out- 
look. But Darwinism was narrow and con- 
fined in its scope in comparison with the 
teaching of "In Memoriam." Confessedly 
it left out the spiritual side of life. Darwin, 
at one time destined for the Christian minis- 
try, was never anti-spiritual, or dogmatic 
outside of his own sphere; he was merely 
negative. Indeed, he deplored the narrow- 
ness of the groove into which circumstances 
had forced him. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 91 

Tennyson's consideration of sleep and 
death as one takes up a short section, the 
forty-third, an intervital state being sup- 
posed, in which the dead remain quiescent 
like flowers. Is this "still garden of the 
souls" a herbarium siccum, as some have 
termed it? Hardly, for Tennyson was too 
close to the open garden, too profound a 
lover of outward nature, to revert to the 
botanical museum for his analogies. It 
would, indeed, be difficult to imagine the re- 
vival to life and energy after such a process. 
Light is thrown on the subject by a para- 
graph in his Memoir (II, 421) : "If the im- 
mediate life after death be only sleep, and 
the spirit between this life and the next 
should be folded like a flower in a night 
slumber, then the remembrance of the past 
might remain, as the smell and the color do in 
the sleeping flower; and in that case the 
memory of our love would last as true, and 
would live pure and whole within the spirit 
of my friend until after it was unfolded at 
the breaking of the morn, when the sleep was 
over." 

It is the soul, "bare of the body," that is 
here compared to the quiescent flower; for 



92 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

the poet, as we know, was quite resigned to 
the processes of nature, to the return of the 
body to mother earth. The chnging to the 
physical body as something of value after 
death — being merely sleep — ^has marked 
many civilizations, notably the Egyptian. 
The extraordinary care spent on the dead, so 
that their mummified frames defy the 
ravages of time, may or may not be associ- 
ated with a belief in immortal Ufe. In the 
case of the Egyptians this tribute to the dead 
meant a looking forward to a solemn trial of 
the departed, when their hearts were weighed 
by Thoth, the scribe of the gods, and a 
monster devoured those that would not bal- 
ance against the divine feather. Intense im- 
portance in this case attached to the preser- 
vation of all the parts of the body, in view of 
a favorable sentence and a renewed and 
happy life. Yet the very absence of any 
assurance that a renewed life is possible may 
cause the survivor to preserve the body of the 
loved one in as perfect a condition as art can 
contrive. 

With the Egyptians there was the con- 
ception of a guardian angel who, in the court 
of heaven, looked after the interests of the 



OF "IN MEMORIAM*^ 93 

living person, and at critical times would 
lend a helping hand to warn of danger or of 
a false step. Probably the personality was 
supposed to continue after death with the 
guardian angel, until resumption of activi- 
ties after the Judgment. Tennyson, how- 
ever, does not associate it with the dead. 
He clutched at this conception, as one that 
gave him comfort, supplying a connection 
between earth and heaven : 

"If such a dreamy touch should fall, 

O turn thee round, resolve the doubt; 
My guardian angel will speak out 
In that high place, and tell thee all." 

He depends on his own guardian angel to aid 
him, if his friend were beginning to forget 
him. 

This belief in a guardian angel, a heavenly 
double, occurs in literature from Plato to 
Cardinal Manning. It is found in Ovid 
(Tristia, III, 13, 5). The Christian doc- 
trine bases itself on the passage in Matthew's 
Gospel, 18. 10: "In heaven their angels do 
always behold the face of my Father which is 
in heaven." 

A modern in his attitude toward nature. 



94 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

Tennyson never clung to an Egyptian-like 
conservation of the bodily frame. He is re- 
signed to the processes of nature: 



(( 



. . we may stand 
Where he in English earth is laid, 
And from his ashes may be made 
The violet of his native land." 



And even in reference to the good offices of 
the guardian angel he is troubled lest his 
friend in the absorbing activities of his new 
and nobler life may forget his old associates 
on earth. He cannot imagine his friend, 
that eager spirit, as folded up in sleep until 
the resurrection. 



OP "IN MEMORIAM*^ 95 



CHAPTER XX 

PERSONALITY AND 
IMMORTALITY 

Modern thought hovers round the fact of 
personahty, as of final importance in the in- 
terpretation of things. With Tennyson it 
had a first place. In the forty-fifth section 
he advances the theory that life may be the 
period chosen for the development of person- 
ahty. The hfe in a preexistent state, such 
as is discussed in Wordsworth's "Intima- 
tions of Immortality from Recollections in 
Childhood," being devoid of personality, the 
chief end of this life may be to "round into a 
separate mind." Memory begins here, and 
will last, so that in the "second birth of 
death" man will not have to learn himself 
anew. Some have regarded the section as a 
distinct contribution to thought in this par- 
ticular field. 

For the Buddhist doctrine of Nirvana, the 
absorption of the personality at death in the 
general soul, Tennyson had httle use; he 



96 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

terms it "a faith as vague as all imsweet." 
With the general position of Buddhism, that 
this is an imperfect, changing, sinful world, 
and that for its interpretation there is needed 
a divine light, leading to the annihilation of 
sin, he was in full sympathy. But to make 
salvation an "escape from evil and an obtain- 
ing of bliss," in the sense of peace and the 
extinction of personality — a happy dream- 
land — appealed to him as little as to the 
ordinary Buddhist, who is not concerned 
with the ultimate goal of humanity. 
Buddhism as it has developed in Japan is by 
no means tied down to the misty Nirvana of 
the earlier faith. Some, like the followers 
of Zen, flatly deny the possibility of personal 
immortality, and seek for beatitude in the 
present world by the pathway of noble 
conduct. 

In a recent book. The Religion of the 
Samurai, a "Study of Zen Philosophy and 
Discipline in China and Japan," by a Tokyo 
professor, Kaiten Nukariya, the writer has a 
paragraph headed "The Irrationahty of the 
Belief in Immortahty." His objections are 
five-fold: "In the first place, it throws no 
light upon the relation of mind and body. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 97 

and serves to explain nothing. On the con- 
trary, it adds another mystery to the abeady 
mysterious relationships between matter and 
spirit. Secondly, soul should be conceived 
as a psychical individual, subject to spatial 
determinations; but since it has to be de- 
prived by death of its body which individual- 
izes it, it will cease to be individuality after 
death, to the disappointment of the believer. 
How could you think of anything purely 
spiritual and formless existing without 
blending with other things ? Thirdly, it fails 
to gratify the desire, cherished by the believ- 
er, of enjoying eternal life, because soul has 
to lose its body, the sole important medium 
through which it can enjoy life. Fourthly, 
soul is taken as a subject matter to receive in 
the future life the reward or the punishment 
from God for our actions in this life ; but the 
very idea of eternal punishment is inconsist- 
ent with the boundless love of God. Fifthly, 
it is beyond all doubt that soul is conceived 
as an entity, which unifies various mental 
faculties and exists as the foundation of in- 
dividual personality. But the existence of 
such soui is quite incompatible with the well- 
known pathological fact that it is possible 



98 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

for the individual to have double or treble or 
multiple personalities." 

Professor Nukariya, who is on the faculty 
both of the So-to-shu Buddhist College of 
Tokyo, and of Keio University — an institu- 
tion of standing which has had on its faculty 
Unitarian professors from Harvard Uni- 
versity (one our present Minister to Greece) 
— shows an acquaintance with modern phil- 
osophy, quoting freely from Bergson, 
Haeckel, Muensterberg, and others; and 
with English literature, where he quotes 
from Shakespeare and Milton down to 
Whittier, Longfellow, and Edwin Arnold. 
But there is not a single quotation from 
Tennyson, although at least once the 
"Flower in the crannied wall" would have 
come in appositely. Is this mere neglect, 
due to the unreasonable discounting of the 
poet in so many circles, or a distinct evasion? 

Other Buddhist sects, busy to-day in 
Hawaii and on the Pacific Coast, hold out a 
paradise which differs but little in essence 
from the Christian conception ; a higher life 
"beyond the veil" and a fellowship with 
Amida Buddha and the saints. 

The Platonic doctrine of reminiscence was 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 99 

in accord with the views of the human soul 
held by Chaldean astrologists, men of the 
kind who came to Bethlehem at the time of 
our Lord's birth, and worshiped at his cradle. 
The symbolic truth contained in this incident 
has not been sufficiently grasped. These 
men represented a world of lofty thought 
which had striven with the question of im- 
mortality as the Semitic world had as yet 
failed to do. And now they came to lay 
their trophies before Him who "brought life 
and immortality to light." Their observa- 
tions of the starry skies had led these Chal- 
deans to the notion of a divine eternity. Out 
of this divine eternity came the spirits of 
men, passing through the spheres of the 
seven planets. As they passed through each 
of the planets they acquired the dispositions 
and qualities peculiar to the planet. On earth 
the soul remained subject to bitter destiny; 
but at death the souls of such as had attained 
to virtue returned to their original abode by 
the route by which they had come. As they 
ascended they purged themselves from 
earthly passions and qualities they had ac- 
quired in their descent to earth. A Psycho- 
pompos, or conductor of souls, led them from 



100 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

one sphere to another, and, at each door that 
opened, a password was uttered that gave 
them entry, for there was a guardian at every 
door. Finally the souls of the initiated 
penetrated to the eighth heaven, where they 
enjoyed everlasting happiness as subtle 
essences. 

These ancient thinkers conceived of the 
soul as passing through geons, and gave no 
finahty to the life of the present state. Ten- 
nyson is fond of this term "^eon," and the 
cognate "seonian," words little used in Eng- 
lish literature before. Henry More, the 
Cambridge Platonist, uses the term in his 
Songs of the Soul. With the followers of 
his master, Plato, it had a mystic meaning, 
symbolizing a power existing from eternity, 
or an emanation proceeding from the su- 
preme ruler of the universe, which takes part 
in the creation and guidance of the present 
world. Other "seons" direct other worlds. 
In his short dramatic dialogue, "The Ring," 
dedicated, by the way, to James Russell 
Lowell, there occurs a passage near the be- 
ginning which contains the word "asonian," 
as well as the word "veil," used in a mystical 
way: 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 101 

"The Ghost in Man, the Ghost that once was 
Man, 
But cannot wholly free itself from Man, 
Are calling to each other thro' a dawn 
Stranger than earth has ever seen: the veil 
Is rending, and the Voices of the day 
Are heard across the Voices of the dark. 
No sudden heaven, or sudden hell, for man, 
But thro' the W^ill of One who knows and rules — 
And utter knowledge is but utter love — 
-Ionian Evolution, swift or slow. 
Thro' all the Spheres — an ever opening height, 
An ever lessening earth." 

The speaker is discussing the possibility of 
getting in touch with his dead wife, as Ten- 
nyson longed to get in touch with his lost 
friend Hallam. 

Modern psychologists do not scoff any 
longer at these aspirations. In his admir- 
able lectures on Human Immortality , de- 
livered on the IngersoU Foundation at 
Harvard University in the winter of 1 SOT- 
OS, William James, ablest of American 
thinkers in his day, combated the material- 
istic interpretation of human consciousness, 
as the only possible interpretation of life that 
could appeal to a practical man. "In cases 
of conversion," he remarks, speaking in quite 



102 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

Platonic fashion, "in providential leadings, 
sudden mental healings, etc., it seems to the 
subjects themselves of the experience as if a 
power from without, quite different from the 
ordinary action of the senses or of the sense- 
led mind, came into their life, as if the latter 
suddenly opened into the greater life in 
which it had its source. The word ^influx,' 
used in Swedenborgian circles, well describes 
the impression of new insight, new wilUng- 
ness, sweeping over us like a tide." 

These twice-born men, indeed, from Paul 
downward, set the clock of history, for they 
seem, even to the ordinary man, to touch a 
higher and more real life. 

The hallowing influence on conduct which 
accrues from living in this higher world is a 
theme dealt with in a late section (XCIV) : 

"How pure at heart and sound in head. 
With what divine affections bold, 
Should be the man whose thoughts would hold 
An hour's communion with the dead?" 

This influence is singularly absent in the 
superman, who tramples on a "dead self" 
in order to reach supposedly "higher things." 
Faith in another world is needed, in the final 
issue, to preserve the world's moral sanity. 



OF «IN MEMORIAM" 103 



CHAPTER XXI 

PERSONALITY, SCIENCE, AND 
IMMORTALITY 

On one occasion, toward the very close of 
the poet's life, Benjamin Jowett and Lord 
Selborne were visiting him at his home. The 
Lord Chancellor, who served as Lord Rector 
of Saint Andrew's University, was a man of 
high culture and literary acumen; his Book 
of Praise is a good piece of hymnology. The 
three were discussing the "message value" of 
"In Memoriam," and Tennyson put in a de- 
precatory phrase. It did not please the 
Master of Balliol. "Your poetry," he de- 
clared in protest, "has an element of phil- 
osophy more to be considered than any 
regular philosophy in England. It is almost 
too much impregnated with philosophy, yet 
this to some minds will be its greatest charm. 
I believe that your 'In Memoriam' and your 
'Crossing the Bar' will live forever in men's 
hearts." 

Three years later William Ewart Glad- 
stone made a similar remark in a letter to 



104 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

Hallam Tennyson: "I have a great concep- 
tion of your father as a philosopher. The 
'sage' of Chelsea (a genius too) was small 
in comparison with him." 

These estimates are in line with the latest 
methods in philosophy. It is to the poetry 
of India, such as the "Bhagavadgita," rather 
than to philosophical discussions, that stu- 
dents go for the final interpretation and 
evaluation of Indian thought in the past. 

It is interesting to note how the phrase- 
ology of Tennyson has entered into modern 
discussion. Four times in his short treatise 
on Human Immortality does Professor 
William James use the term "behind the 
veil," as if it were needed in the vocabulary 
of a complete philosophy; a contribution, as 
I have tried to show elsewhere, of hym- 
nology to Tennyson's poetry, and of Tenny- 
son's poetry to the world of exact thought. 
The phrase occurs, for example, in the 
Preface to the Second Edition (p. vii) : 
"The plain truth is that one may conceive the 
mental world behind the veil in as individual- 
istic a form as one pleases^ without any detri- 
ment to the general scheme by which the 
brain is represented as a transmissive organ,"' 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 105 

In this and other ways the Harvard pro- 
fessor corroborates in a striking way the 
remark of Jowett. "The whole problem of 
immortal life," he declares, "has its prime 
roots in personal feeling. . . . There are in- 
dividuals with a real passion for the matter, 
men and women for whom a life hereafter is 
a pungent craving, and the thought of it an 
obsession ; and in whom keenness of interest 
has bred an insight into the relations of the 
subject that no one less penetrated with the 
mystery of it can attain." He recognizes 
that "Immortahty is one of the great spir- 
itual needs of man." 

And so the summative sentences at the 
close of this Preface are of exceeding encour- 
agement to the honest inquirer after truth, 
whom doubt seizes when the supposed scien- 
tific man proclaims that death ends all. 
Man, insists Tennyson, would never have 
attained to his present state in civiUzation 
had this doubt gripped his vitals: it would 
have confirmed him in selfishness and sullen 
laziness. If death had been so understood, 
then — 

"Love had not been, 
Or been in narrowest working shut, 



106 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

*'Mere fellowship of sluggish moods, 
Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape 
Had bruised the herb and crush'd the grape, 
And bask'd and batten'd in the woods." 

And Professor William James, speaking in 
the name of science, asserts that he has no 
quarrel whatever with the man who believes 
"that every memory and affection of his 
present life is to be preserved, and that he 
shall never in secula seculorum cease to be 
able to say to himself, 'I am the same per- 
sonal being who in old times upon the earth 
had those experiences!' " 

This phrase, '^^in secula seculorum/^ from 
the Latin Vulgate, translates the Greek "to 
the geons of the aeons" at the close of the 
Lord's Prayer. The nice distinction has 
been lost in the curt French a jamais ^ "for- 
ever," but remains in the Spanish por todos 
los sighs J "throughout all the ages," trans- 
lating the Vulgate in secula seculorum^ "into 
ages of ages." Tennyson has the term 
"secular" in the sense of "seonic," in two 
passages, XLI, vi, and LXXVI, ii. In the 
first of these passages he shrinks from the 
thought of falling behind his friend in the 
process of the ages. . 

J 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 107 

"But evermore a life behind 
In all the secular to-be." 

In the desire to see his friend again, and 
commune with him, the poet would at the 
least demand a limited reunion in a second 
seon, when they should sit in companionship, 

"Enjoying each the other's good: 
What vaster dream can hit the mood 
Of Love on earth? He seeks at least 

"Upon the last and sharpest height, 
Before the spirits fade away, 
Some landing-place, to clasp and say, 
'Farewell ! We lose ourselves in light.' " 

Yet the inmiortality which he desires and 
looks for is not really so limited. The re- 
union will be permanent, in company with 
the Master. When he "crosses the bar," and 
"meets his Pilot face to face," his friend 
Hallam will be there. Meanwhile he rests 
in hope: 

"But in my spirit will I dwell 

And dream my dream and hold it true; 
For though my lips may breathe adieu, 
I cannot think the thing farewell." 

A hopeful "Adieu," not a hopeless "Fare- 
weU!" 



108 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

With a certain impatience of the slow 
processes of history, to be kindly dealt with 
in one who Uved so much with his thoughts 
"behind the veil," the poet seems almost to 
have given up an amelioration of hf e in the 
present aeon. Conditions to-day, when the 
forces of a brutal militarism have wet the 
fields and homes of Europe with blood, 
would no doubt have confirmed him in his 
other-worldliness. The following is one of 
his later utterances : 

The Making of Man 

"Where is one that, born of woman, altogether 
can escape 
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, 
or of ape? 
Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning 
Ages of ages, 
Shall not seon after seon pass and touch him into 
shape ? 

"All about him shadow still, but, while the races 
flower and fade. 
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining 
on the shade. 
Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices 
blend in choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker 'It is finished. Man is 
m^de,' " 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 109 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 

Just before the passionate close of the 
fifty-sixth section, where the epical part of 
"In Memoriam" ends, the poet comes to the 
Machiavellian attitude toward evil, which 
would calmly and deliberately justify 
wrongdoing by the supposed after beneficial 
results. This debased morality has been the 
deliberate state pohcy of Prussia since Fred- 
erick the Great's time. Nay, it began as 
early as Luther, who accepted a theory of 
unlimited state sovereignty which divorced 
pohtical ethics from personal ethics. In his 
recent admirable treatise. The English- 
Speaking Peoples, so able a historian as 
George Louis Beer asserts that this un- 
Puritan understanding of state responsi- 
bility comes to us from Machiavelli through 
Luther and Hobbes. It developed into a 
deadly organism in the Junkerdom of 
Prussia, making Berlin the poison center of 
the world: 



110 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

" *My chief fear,' wrote my old Greek pro- 
fessor, Lewis Campbell, in a private letter 
dated so far back as 1904, 'is from the Bis- 
marckian — L e. Machiavellian — policy of 
Germany.' One of the clearest thinkers and 
most finished scholars of his time, he suc- 
ceeded to the labors of Benjamin Jowett, his 
beloved teacher and friend, and has written 
his biography (in collaboration) . Of Jowett, 
wisest of Oxonians, I have spoken else- 
where." 

This doctrine, especially in its German in- 
terpretation, makes the state bitterly selfish 
in its principles of action. When Heinrich 
von Treitschke, the contemporary of Nietz- 
sche, whom he survived some six or seven 
years, went to Berlin from Saxony to teach 
the same dangerous kind of morality from 
the political side, he boldly asserted that the 
only moral law which possibly can hold good 
for states is, in its very foundations, the 
Christian law inverted. The moral attitude 
of the State — let us deify it with a capital 
letter — ^is not love for other States, which 
would weaken it and lay it open to attack, 
but hate. So true is this, he declares, that 
for one State to regard another with any sort 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 111 

of kindliness is a sin. It exists to gain 
power; and power comes by the brute force 
of arms. He was more Machiavellian by 
far than the Italian thinker ever dared to be ; 
he accused Machiavelli of being too timid in 
defense of the State's freedom from conven- 
tional morality. His cult, as he himself con- 
fesses, is a reversion to the worship of the 
devil, who was responsible for the fall of our 
first parents and brought sin into Eden. 

It may be objected that Treitschke does 
not sum up German philosophy, and that 
other teachers have been expounded in Ger- 
man universities. But there is no doubt that 
his influence has taken a subtle and danger- 
ous form; that his philosophy permeated 
German life and thought before the war, 
and became the last word on many vital ques- 
tions. The latest authoritative book coming 
from Berlin before the revolution. Baron von 
Freytag-Loringhoven's Deductions from the 
World War, evidently regards Treitschke as 
a name to conjure with among his country- 
men. The Baron, late deputy chief of the 
German Imperial Staff, is regarded as the 
most accomplished soldier writer in Prussia. 
In the sixth and closing chapter he quotes a 



lis THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

philosopher thrice in support of his conten- 
tions, and in each case the philosopher is 
Treitschke. "War banishes pretense and re- 1 
veals the truth," he declares, "producing the 
most sublime manifestations of masculine 
personality. If ever an age has corrobo- 
rated the words of Treitschke, that 'the fea- 
tures of history are virile,' it is the present. 
Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a 
beautiful dream. The world war has fully 
confirmed the words of Heinrich von Treit- 
schke: *The polished man of the world and 
the brute have the same instincts in them.' 
Nothing is truer than the biblical doctrine of 
original sin, which is not to be uprooted by 
civilization to whatever point you bring it." 
To the Baron the conservation of peace re- 
mains a Utopia, and would be felt to be an 
intolerable tutelage by any great and proud- 
spirited nation. Here again he bids his 
countrymen heed Treitschke's warning. He 
goes on to say unpleasant things of Presi- 
dent Wilson's proposals for the formation of 
such a league, the underlying motive being 
only "business pacifism, and so at bottom 
nothing else than crass materialism." It is 
interesting to note the complete acceptance. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 113 

by this recognized exponent of German mili- 
tarism, of the philosophical doctrines of 
Nietzsche and Treitschke. 

It is greatly to the credit of Tennyson's 
spiritual insight that, suroming up in his 
Invocation the final truths which lie at the 
basis of our civilization, he should have given 
such prominence to this primal truth: that 
man, whether as an individual or as a mem- 
ber of a society or "State" — an entity which 
Treitschke deifies or rather "devilizes" — ^is 
bound to serve only God's will ; a higher will, 
coming to us not through nature and a study 
of its laws, but directly to the human soul, by 
prayer and a new life. There is no entity 
called the state which may shelter itself 
under a so-called law of nature, termed the 
survival of the fittest. It was not in Ger- 
many only that this condoning of sin and evil 
in political matters found favor. Writing 
in the Westminster Review (always an 
organ remote from evangelical doctrines, by 
the way) some years before the great war, a 
writer bearing two good English names, H. 
Douglas Gregory, declared that "there are 
times when, in pohtical conduct a deviation 
from the straight path of strict morality (in 



114 Tim SPlRlTtTAL MEANING 

its private sense) is not only permissible, but 
also in the highest degree praiseworthy and 
necessary. The ItaUan War of Liberation 
was one of these occasions ; the rise of Prus- 
sian supremacy was another." A singularly 
bad forecast in the light of to-day. 

These doctrines of Treitschke were wildly 
applauded in the University of Berlin as the 
latest development of "truth without non- 
sense" — cold, matter-of-fact science applied 
to politics. It must be remembered that 
Berlin has no traditions of the noble medi- 
aeval universities, like Tennyson's Cam- 
bridge, or Jowett's Oxford, for it is little 
over a century old. It is in essence a large 
scientific institute, given over to a treatment 
of religion and the state that is rationalistic 
and unsound at its very core. Founded dur- 
ing Goethe's lifetime, it lacks in its teaching 
and philosophy of life what Goethe lacked — 
reverence and charity. During the past 
eighty years the Sage of Weimar's name has 
been one to conjure with in Germany. He 
is the apostle of German Kultur, 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 115 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE HIGH PRIEST OF GERMAN 
KULTUR 

Tennyson came to manhood when the 
cult of the Teutonic sage was reaching high- 
water mark among thinking men in Eng- 
land. It was not until close on the year 
1830 that Carlyle's articles were allowed into 
the Edinburgh Review, whose editor, 
Francis Jeffrey, (1803-1829), had little use 
for his "German divinities." But when, in 
1832, just after Goethe's death, Carlyle con- 
tributed an article to the Foreign Quarterly, 
the effect was remarkable, and a real Goethe 
cult set in. For the next ten years the 
Scotchman had the ear of the English public, 
and essentially as a missionary of German 
ideals. At this time Tennyson was work- 
ing out his fundamentals of life, and he gave 
the Carlyle cult its due. Though he never 
became a German scholar, yet he loved 
Goethe's lyrics, especially his Edel set der 
Menschj and was fully aware of the strength 



116 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

and force of Carlyle's message. Yet on the 
subject of immortality Carlyle was less satis- 
factory than his master Goethe, who admit- 
ted that it was a weakness to lose faith in a 
future life. His dimness of faith in the clos- 
ing years of his life was a matter of deep 
regret to Tennyson. One evening the old 
friends were smoking a pipe in a London 
coffee house, when the talk turned upon the 
subject of immortality. "Eh — old Jewish 
rags," said Carlyle; "you must clear your 
mind of all that. Why should we expect a 
hereafter? Your traveler comes to an inn, 
and he takes his bed; it's only for a night. 
He leaves next day and another man takes 
his place and sleeps in the bed that he has 
vacated." To which Tennyson answered, 
appositely: "Your traveler comes to his inn 
in the morning, and goes on his way rejoic- 
ing, with the sure and certain hope and belief 
that he is going somewhere, where he will 
sleep the next night." 

"You have him there," remarked Edward 
Fitzgerald, who happened to be present. 

Carlyle's illustration snapped in his hands. 

Tennyson's break with Goethe came as a 
result of the shock which his whole spiritual 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 117 

frame received from the sudden death of his 
friend and mentor, Arthur Hallam. If a 
so-called "good God," ruling all things with 
wisdom and deliberation, allowed a spirit like 
Hallam's to be cut off when on the threshold 
of usefulness, then all his trust in divine 
goodness was gone. Turning to Goethe's 
philosophy, he found no comfort. The phil- 
osopher, who knew so well the laws of nature 
and the call of art, did little more than shrug 
his shoulders when the matter of personal 
immortality came to be discussed, and passed 
on to more congenial themes. But, with 
Hallam dead, this was the one theme of im- 
portance to his bereaved friend. He could 
not, he would not, regard their friendship as 
merely an evolutionary experience in life, to 
be forgotten quickly if the remembrance 
were painful. His former self when with 
Hallam — this was his living self. It must 
never become a "dead self." 

Students of modern history are acquainted 
with the extravagances of the Goethe cult in 
Germany, when, after the successes of the 
Franco-Prussian war, the new empire began 
to suffer from the megalomania which has 
led it to destruction. Lecturing in Berlin 



118 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

on "Faust," Professor Grimm characterized 
it as "the greatest work of the greatest poet 
of all times and all peoples." Conmienting 
on which extraordinary utterance soon after 
it was made, Matthew Arnold sarcastically 
remarks: "If this is but the letting out of 
the waters, the coming times may expect a 
deluge." It has come in these times in a 
very satanic form. 

We may take Arnold's own estimate. He 
regards Goethe not only as the greatest poet 
of our modern times, but also, "in the width, 
depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by 
far our greatest modern man." This state- 
ment must surely be taken with reservation. 
In Arnold's wonderfully incisive "Memorial 
Verses," where he sizes up three great poetic 
lights — Byron, Wordsworth, and Goethe — 
he begins his lines on the Weimar sage as 
follows : 

"When Goethe's death was told we said: 
'Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head. 
Physician of the iron age, 
Goethe has done his pilgrimage. 
He took the suffering human race, 

He read each wound, each weakness clear; 
And struck his finger on the place, 

And said : "Thou ailest here, and here!" ' " 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 119 

This is a testimony to Goethe's power of 
diagnosis, making him a physician, not in the 
higher sense of leading the patient into a new 
hf e and into renewed strength, hke the Great 
Physician, but merely interpreting his ail- 
ment. His prescription was, "Art still has 
truth, take refuge there." Art, in the sense 
of grasp of the truths of nature and the ac- 
quirement of power over her forces, is no 
medicine for the weary soul. It entirely 
evades the fact of sin and the need of re- 
demption. The noble conception of con- 
duct, that heritage of twice-born men who 
are the glory of the Christian church, was 
certainly not present in Goethe. Indeed, he 
had scant interest in rehgious life and saintly 
men. When traveling in Italy it was with 
pagan Italy only that he showed sympathy ; 
flatly, Goethe was at heart a pagan. Com- 
ing to the church of the saintly Francis at 
Assisi, "I passed it by," he remarks, "in 
disgust." Dante's "Inferno" he thought 
abominable, and the "Paradiso" tiresome. 
No wonder the sympathies of Italy, in this 
world crisis, turned away from the land 
which has made an idol of Goethe. 
And then we have his cold and ugly treat- 



120 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

ment of women, presaging Nietzsche's con- 
tempt for the sex, and also the degradation 
of women which has followed the track of 
German armies in the War. Frederica, 
whom he ought to have married, he coolly- 
dropped when self-interest pointed else- 
where. His later cohabitation with Chris- 
tiana Vulpius has been termed, by a friendly 
enough critic, "a degrading connection 
with a girl of no education, whom Goethe 
established in his house to the great embar- 
rassment of all his friends, whom he either 
could not or would not marry until eighteen 
years later, and who punished him as he de- 
served by taking a turn for drink — a turn 
which the unfortunate son inherited." To 
call such a man a physician in any moral 
sense is surely a misapplication of the 
word. In Goethe we find all the root 
defects of Kultur; a following after art 
without any moral reverence, a divorce 
of intellectual insight and worthy con- 
duct. 

On one occasion Tennyson and Edward 
Fitzgerald, translator of Omar Khayyam's 
"Rubaiyat," were walking down the Strand 
when they came to a bust of Goethe in a 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 121 

shop window. "What is wanting in the 
face?" inquired Fitzgerald, musingly. 

"The divine," was Tennyson's immediate 
answer. 

For he did not place him, along with 
Plato, among the "godlike faces." 



122 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XXIV 

TENNYSON AND PLATO 

"There are at least three ways," remarks 
Professor Stuart P. Sherman in his recent 
suggestive "On Contemporary Literature," 
"of discrediting the current naturahsm. The 
most difficult, perhaps, is to attack it from 
purely metaphysical grounds. The most 
unanswerable is to oppose it with religious 
intuitions. The simplest, and possibly not 
the least effective, is to meet it with John- 
sonian common sense, appealing to the gen- 
eral reason and experience of mankind 
against the conclusions of the ratiocinative 
faculty of the individual." All three 
methods of arriving at truth seem to have 
been flatly rejected by modern Germany. 
To the sane man the empire has thrown 
away her heritage in these last few years like 
a crazed gambler, showing herself as foolish 
in conduct as was Nietzsche in his wild Thus 
Spake Zarathustra lucubrations. In re- 
spect to the second method, the national and 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 123 

professional attitude to the Christianity of 
love as we understand it may be summed 
up in the learned Herr Professor's dictum: 
Aller Methodismus ist vom Uebel, And 
certainly the "godlike face of Plato the 
wise," as Tennyson terms him in the "Palace 
of Art," has been turned away from Ger- 
many during these fateful years in sad dis- 
approval. 

If there is a real Platonist among our 
poets and prophets, it is to Tennyson we 
must turn. Educated in the university 
which produced over two centuries ago those 
thinkers and idealists, the Cambridge Pla- 
tonists, he was true to the drift of his Alma 
Mater. Cambridge was also the home of 
English Puritanism, and has been the 
mother of English universities over the 
world, beginning with Harvard and Yale. 
Among other extraordinary assertions, un- 
true to fact, made by megalomaniac modern 
Germany, is her claim to continue and de- 
velop the spirit of Plato. Nietzsche, as we 
saw, had little use for Socrates. In his 
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century^ 
(Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhun- 

1 John Laoe Company, New York, Publishers* 



lU THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

derts, 1889), a glorification of German 
thought and achievement warmly recom- 
mended to all high-school students by the 
late Kaiser, Chamberlain closes with the 
assertion: "In order to rescue ourselves 
from endless complexity, and once more to 
attain simphcity, we must always ask our- 
selves the question : 'How should Plato have 
acted?' Such is the advice of our greatest 
Teuton, Goethe." 

But the latest exponent of Plato, one of 
the sanest and clearest of American thinkers 
to-day, Paul Elmer More, denies that either 
Kant or Goethe really knew or expounded 
Plato ; they were pseudo-Platonists. "Goethe 
unwittingly was giving expression to the 
everlasting formula of pseudo-Platonism 
when he put into the mouth of Mephisto- 
pheles the fateful words, 'I am the spirit 
that denies.' It is God that denies. The 
moment these terms are reversed, what is 
reverenced as the spirit becomes a snare in- 
stead of a monitor; hberty is turned into 
license, a glamour of sanctity is thrown over 
the desires of the heart, the himiility of 
doubt goes out of the mind, the will to fol- 
low this or that impulsion is invested with 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 125 

divine authority, there is an utter confusion 
of the higher and the lower elements of our 
nature."^ Religion is self-denial, the taking 
up of the cross; and Goethe is entirely on 
the other side of the fence. So were not 
Socrates and Plato; they were forerunners 
of Christian culture, exponents of the great 
law of inhibition, the divine Thou must not, 
placing happiness in self-sacrifice, in the 
losing of one's life to gain it. Goethe is the 
high priest of Kultur, or glorified selfish- 
ness. 

It is to the eternal glory of Tennyson 
that he detected the issue in all its depth and 
width for humanity at the very time when 
the glamour of Goethe's art teaching was 
at its height among his countrymen. He 
lived long enough to see the Carlyle cult 
wither, and the sage of Chelsea's voice sound 
like a cracked bell. And he has left to the 
reverent English spirit the exquisite lyric 
of his own sunset days, which finds a place 
in almost every modern hymnal — "Crossing 
the Bar." Here is Platonism of the purest 
quality — the final arrival of the soul in the 
eternal kingdom of holiness ; Plato's pattern 

1 Platonism, p. 273. 



J 



1^6 THE SPIBITUAL MEANING 

laid up in heaven toward which earthly com- 
monwealths are striving: 

"For though from out our bourne of Time and 
Place 
The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crost the bar." 

"Perhaps in heaven," remarks one of the 
speakers at the close of the ninth book of 
Plato's "Republic," "there is laid up a pat- 
tern of it (the ideal city or commonwealth) 
for him who wishes to behold it, and behold- 
ing to organize himself accordingly." This 
commonwealth was not only an ideal organ- 
ization of the community, but also of man's 
own moral constitution, found in the com- 
plete life ; an idea developed in the parables 
of our Lord, where the kingdom of heaven 
is of three kinds : in a man's heart, as a vision 
of excellence and the eternal, and as a pos- 
sible constitution on earth, for which good 
men are striving daily. 

Tennyson is a true Christian reahst, and 
/ true Platonist at the same time. Arnold, 
with his "Elysian Fields," is the sentimen- 
tahst. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM'^ in 



CHAPTER XXV 

CALVINISM VERSUS MACHIA- 
VELLIANISM 

The great religious political thinker of 
the ages, as Plato is the great metaphysician, 
will be found in the Frenchman John Cal- 
vin, who is too often underrated and mis- 
understood because of the hardness of his 
theology as it touched the individual. His 
greatness lay in the political field. As that 
great statesman and literary critic Viscount 
Morley remarked in his Romanes Lectures 
delivered before the University of Oxford 
twenty years ago, Calvin united a profound 
political instinct with a fervid religious faith 
almost unexampled in history. He was pre- 
eminently the theologian of the Reforma- 
tion, and may be said to have saved it as a 
movement. In httle Geneva he set up a 
bulwark against the forces of Spanish and 
Roman reaction which saved the cause of 
democracy. No one can estimate the loss 
to humanity had the little republic been 



128 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

wiped outHby the dukes of Savoy. Such is 
the testimony of the Positivist John Mor- 
ley, whose father, it is true, was brought up 
a Wesleyan, but who himself had been out- 
side of church currents all his hfe. (His 
father, however, selected as his peerless man 
the saintly Scotchman Thomas Chalmers.) 
He spoke weightily as a thinker and a states- 
man, in the Sheldonian Theater, before an 
audience filled with budding statesmen, 
when he declared that the world-issue of 
to-day lay between Calvinism and Machia- 
velhanism. To Methodists the issue must 
not be clouded by the fact that they call 
themselves Arminians. The great apostle 
of Calvinistic evangelicalism Charles 
Simeon, who was in the last decade of his 
honored ministry of fifty years at Cam- 
bridge when Tennyson and Hallam were 
students at the university, did more in his 
long pastorate to carry on the mission of 
John Wesley than any other Englishman. 
He was the "man behind the guns" in the 
sending out to India of men like Henry 
Martyn, Bishop Wilson, and Sir Robert 
Grant, who has contributed seven of its 
finest lyrics to the Methodist Hymnal, nota- 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 129 

bly No. 106, beginning, "O worsfiip the king, 
all-glorious above." This statesman-lyrist 
has given us, in two stanzas of his hymn, 
possibly the finest exposition extant of 
Divine Providence: 

"Thy bountiful care what tongue can recite? 
It breathes in the air, it shines in the light, 
It streams from the hills, it descends to the 

plain, 
And sweetly distils in the dew and the rain. 

"Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail, 
In thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail ; 
Thy mercies how tender ! how firm to the end ! 
Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend." 

Nay, more— it was Charles Simeon who, 
when on a visit to Scotland, was instru- 
mental in the conversion of the parents of 
Alexander Duff, whose long life as a mis- 
sionary in Bengal has left permanent educa- 
tional and other records at Calcutta and 
elsewhere. People to-day wonder why 
India has kept so loyal to the British flag; 
I would answer, largely from the influence 
of the devout men sent out from Cambridge 
University during the pastorate of Simeon. 
A near relative of his was the dead friend 



ISO THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

to whom Tennyson's "In the Garden at 
Swainston" is dedicated: 

"Two dead men have I known 
In courtesy like to thee: 
Two dead men have I loved 
With a love that ever will be: 
Three dead men have I loved, and 
thou art last of the three." 

The three were Sir John Suneon, Henry 
Lushington, brother of the E. L. L. of "In 
Memoriam," and Arthur Hallam. 

Charles Simeon had a memorable inter- 
view with John Wesley in December, 1784, 
when the older man was nearing the close 
of his career. To students of history it 
seems to bisect the century of evangelical 
activity from the launching of the Oxford 
Movement in the early thirties of the eigh- 
teenth century to the death of Simeon in 
1836. Simeon tells the story of the inter- 
view in the preface to one of his books : 

"A young minister, about three or four 
years after he was ordained, had an oppor- 
tunity of conversing familiarly with the 
great and venerable leader of the Arminians 
in this kingdom, and wishing to improve the 
occasion he addressed him nearly in the fol- 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 131 

lowing words: *Sir, I understand you are 
called an Arminian, and I have been some- 
times called a Calvinist, and therefore I sup- 
pose we are to draw daggers. But before 
I consent to begin the combat, with your 
permission I will ask a few questions !' .Then 
followed inquiries regarding the absolute 
need of the grace and mercy of God in *pre- 
serving the believer unto the heavenly king- 
dom.' " 

The result was to establish a complete 
mutual harmony of belief; and Wesley re- 
cords in his Journal that he found Fletcher 
of Madeley and Mr. Simeon "two kindred 
souls, much resembling each other in fervor 
of spirit and earnestness of their address." 

In all the larger aspects of Christian 
faith, especially in those concerning the 
sovereignty of God in his demands upon 
the nation and her rulers, Wesley as an 
Arminian was assuredly at one with his Cal- 
vinistic brethren. To Grimshaw, a Calvin- 
ist, he was prepared to leave the whole care 
of his mission work. Arminianism is as anti- 
Machiavellian as Calvinism. By the won- 
derful Providence it is to an American born 
in a Calvinist manse that the destinies of the 



ISg THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

whole world to-day seem in a large measure 
intrusted. Calvin carried into his reUgious 
faith the great commonwealth idea of Plato : 
that religious life is at the center of every- 
thing, personal and governmental; that the 
Word of God, the eternal Logos, is binding 
on every soul and community, and alone in- 
terprets the universe. To Plato as to Cal- 
vin, the notion of a different law applying 
to the magistrate and to the private citizen 
was loathsome ; such frank Machiavellianism 
as Treitschke's would have been abhorrent. 
Charles Simeon, beginning his ministry 
at Saint Mary's amid a fierce opposition 
from godless undergraduates, won a com- 
plete victory for Christian faith. His voice 
became a dominant one in Cambridge; and 
when he was laid to rest in the noble King's 
College Chapel, the scene was a memorable 
one. "The like of it was never seen," wrote 
an astonished spectator, "nor ever will be 
seen again. More than fifteen hundred 
gownsmen attended to honor a man who had 
been greatly despised." His voice had been 
the voice of Calvin at his best; God's au- 
thority supreme in all life — ^political, liter- 
ary, social, individual. It was hardly cred- 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 133 

ible to many that Simeon should have been 
so honored at his death ; his funeral was like 
that of a royal personage. "His very 
enemies, if any of them lived so long, seemed 
now to be at peace with him." This was the 
reverent Cambridge in which Hallam and 
Tennyson lived and loved. 



134 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XXVI 

KULTUR AND BROTHERLY 
LOVE 

German thought has claimed the heritage 
of Plato; but, like too many of its brazen 
claims, the world may quietly reject it. In 
these two portly volumes of Chamberlain's, 
we are told, at the very close, that Goethe 
of all moderns had most of the spirit of 
Plato. Yet all throughout, the references 
to the Christian working out of the Logos 
are in a contemptuous strain, as belonging 
to the dark side of "weird and stupid super- 
stition, and the arid thorns of scholastic 
sophistry." We know practically that the 
real spiritualism of Plato has been best un- 
derstood by Christian poets and thinkers. 
In English letters it inspires Spenser, Mil- 
ton, More, Vaughan; Wordsworth, in his 
inimitable "Intimations of Immortality from 
Recollections in Childhood"; and lastly, 
Tennyson. The latest critic of the great 
Victorian, Professor Raymond M. Alden of 
Stanford University, in Tennyson, How tO 



OF «IN MEMORIAM" 135 

Know Him, dwells on the Platonism in his 
teaching, in which he followed up the theme 
of Wordsworth's Ode — a prenatal exist- 
ence. In a late lyric, called "Far, Far 
Away," the poet, he remarks (p. 346), 
"questions whether a certain *mystic pain 

or joy' is not 

'A breath 
From some fair dawn beyond the doors of death.' 

So with the inner sense of the mortal self 
reaching into the Infinite. . • . To Mrs. 
Bradley he once said, according to a passage 
in her diary, * There are moments when the 
flesh is nothing to me ; when I feel and know 
the flesh to be vision, God and the spiritual 
the only real and true.' " 

There is a certain brotherly love in Plato, 
very marked in his master Socrates, which 
makes an interpretation of him after the 
German fashion essentially false. "Plato 
taught the doctrine, centuries ago," remarks 
Professor Alden (p. 326), "that love for an 
individual was but a step toward the eternal 
Idea of beauty. Shakespeare told his be- 
loved, 

'Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts 
Which I by lacking have supposed dead.' 



136 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

And Tennyson, in like manner, is led to 
*mingle all the world' with the soul of his 
friend, and to feel him like 'some diffusive 
power' in all the loveliness of natm*e/ 
Hence, by a new kind of Platonism, he iden- 
tifies his aspiration toward reunion with him 
and that toward reunion with the eternal 
source of himianity." 

It is this spirit of human love and sympa- 
thy which has been so markedly absent in 
the whole philosophical attitude of Ger- 
many since the time of Immanuel Kant. A 
German critic of Kant has this incisive pas- 
sage, quoted by Mr. More:^ "Perhaps we 
may say that there is an inner relationship 
between Kant's and the Prussian natiu'e. 
The conception of life as mechanical service, 
a disposition to order everything according 
to rule, a certain disbelief in human nature, 
and a kind of lack of the natural fulness 
of life, are common traits of both." So de- 
clares Friedrich Paulsen in his Immanuel 
Kant, We know that the philosopher, on 
the yearly occasion when the faculty went 
to worship in the church at Koenigsberg, 
left the procession at the door, and returned 

1 Platonism. pp. 276. 277. 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 137 

to home and his desk ! As if pure rationality- 
could cover the whole field of life, as he de- 
sired to cover it in his books. In fact, both 
religion and aesthetics — and the Germans 
are notoriously astray in the latter — ^must 
be discussed in their fullness in the realm of 
social heredity and intercourse, rather in 
that of abstraction and rationality. The 
final backbone of life is the "Communion of 
saints, which is the holy catholic church," 
spiritual, imperishable. 

If Nietzsche ever came near loving any- 
one, it was the musician Richard Wagner. 
He began by being enamoured with his 
works, says Mr. Lichtenberger ; thereafter 
his love and respect were directed to the per- 
sonaUty of the author. Then he loved him 
as a man and a genius independently of his 
works. Introduced to Wagner when the 
master was staying in Leipzig, in 1868, he 
became an intimate friend. "I have made 
an alhance with Wagner," he wrote to a 
friend of his at this time, "and you can 
scarcely imagine how friendly we are; and 
how our projects harmonize." He set to 
deifying his friend, and wrote a brilliant 
laudation, Richard Wagner at Bayreuth, 



138 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

four years later, when In close touch with 
Wagner in his new home at Bayreuth. And 
yet some weeks later he abruptly quitted the 
place, weary and disgusted. Not that he 
had any quarrel, for no one was more sur- 
prised than the musician. But he found 
that he differed in his "soul interpretation 
of things" from the man whom he had de- 
lighted to call friend. "The greatest event 
in my life was a recovery," he remarked 
later; "Wagner was only one of my dis- 
eases." Surely, we have here the disease of 
pure rationality. 

A like devotion given to the whole man, 
emotional and religious as well as intellec- 
tual, is what makes "In Memoriam" superior 
to any pedantic treatise as a compendium of 
philosophical truth. Tennyson, as we have 
seen, follows up his change of attitude to 
the universe, in the thirtieth section, with a 
tribute to that Mary whose glory was that 
she loved the Saviour. And then, in the 
thirty-sixth, he goes on to discuss the loving 
work of such missionaries as John Williams ; 
the Logos worked out in practical hfe 
and brotherly love! 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 139 



CHAPTER XXVII 

MACHIAVELLIANISM AND DE- 
MOCRACY 

The consideration of love as a cosmic 
force leads inevitably to the mystery of evil. 
There comes the subtle question: Can evil 
possibly be justified by the good it pro- 
duces? Tennyson, with sure instinct, falls 
back on the sound position, that evil is under 
all circumstances to be regarded as some- 
thing contrary to God's will. For the 
Machiavellian position that in national 
affairs the statesman needs to be more or 
less a rogue — a position of which German 
militarism to-day has been the incarnation — 
he had no use whatever : 

"Let him, the wiser man [superman?] who springs 
Hereafter, up from childhood, shape 
His action like the greater ape, 
But I was born to other things" (CXX, iii). 

Democracy cannot flourish with such a 
creed, for the people will not trust a pro- 
fessed rogue when they have the right of 



140 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

decision. And Tennyson's idea of govern- 
ment was a process from precedent to prece- 
dent, each precedent being something with 
a moral quantum, and based on a consistent 
moral character; a policy that in the final 
issue of conduct approves itself to the peo- 
ple. Living at a time when British parha- 
mentarism had approved itself, and was be- 
ing copied generally, he did not deem it 
necessary to combat Machiavellianism. It 
was only a few years after his death, how- 
ever, that Viscount Morley, as we have seen, 
speaking before the students of Oxford Uni- 
versity, warned them that there was an issue 
present to-day dividing the world, Machia- 
vellianism and Calvinism: Is the better 
rogue the better statesman? Calvin said 
emphatically, "No!" And the great Cal- 
vinistic epic, "Paradise Lost," makes the 
cleverest of rogues, Satan, on his return to 
Pandemonium after his successful militaris- 
tic expedition against the newly created 
world, shrivel into a hissing snake when he 
begins to boast of his victories. Tennyson 
was with "Milton, that seraph strong," in 
his assertion of eternal Providence. 

It was the other question of consistency 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 141 

in the individual that he strove to answer: 
Is it good for a man to sow his wild oats? 
Is it none the worse for him? And the poet 
replies that such a doctrine may prove to be 
deadly poison. It might be contended that 
evil is sometimes seemingly the way of good, 
mostly perhaps in the form of reaction ; but 
yet the ill-conduct in itself is always to be 
regretted and disapproved. To justify the 
process formally and intellectually is essen- 
tially immoral. The poet has given us his 
explanation of these stanzas : 

"And dare we to this fancy give, 

That had the wild oat not been sown, 
The soil, left barren, scarce had grown 
The grain by which a man may live? 

"Or if we held the doctrine sound 
For life outliving heats of youth. 
Yet who would preach it as a truth 
To those that eddy round and round?" 

(LIII, ii, iii) 

"There is," he declares, as quoted by his son, 
"a passionate heat of nature in a rake some- 
times. The nature that yields emotionally 
may turn out straighter than a prig's. Yet 
we must not be making excuses, but we must 
set before us a rule of good for young as 



14^ THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

for old." We arrogate the divine preroga- 
tive, and are guilty of thorough irreverence, 
if we furnish any excuse for the doing of 
evil. Deliberately to furnish any such justi- 
fication is to play into the hands of the 
"Lords of Hell." Hence his admirable sum- 
ming up : 

"Hold thou the good : define it well : 
For fear divine Philosophy 
Should push beyond her mark, and be 
Procuress to the Lords of Hell." 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 143 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
SERVILE PHILOSOPHERS 

Always deficient in a due sense of the 
value of conduct, German philosophers fell 
into the trap indicated by Tennyson. A 
decade ago German philosophy was re- 
garded highly almost everywhere. Hegel's 
conception of the world as the unfolding of 
the divine purpose; of every evil as a pos- 
sible good, and, properly interpreted, a form 
of good ; of evil as in the last issue a negative 
quantum hardly worth the serious consider- 
ation of the philosopher — such doctrine was 
seemingly seated firmly in the high places 
of our own university centers. It is notori- 
ous that these Neo-Hegelians, some of them 
prominent teachers in Presbyterian and 
other supposedly orthodox institutions, have 
been flabby in respect to the existence of evil 
and its dangers. 

Tennyson's warning is made primarily to 
the individual conscience; but there is such 
a thing as a national conscience, and its 



144. THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

degradation and defilement by a false phi- 
losophy. Germany as a nation has been 
frankly Machiavellian, justifying evil de- 
liberately where an evil deed is supposed to 
benefit the state. She began the war virith 
a Machiavellian utterance. Here is the 
calm statement in the Reichstag on August 
4, 1914, made by the Imperial Chancellor 
von Bethmann-HoUweg: "We were com- 
pelled to override the just protests of the 
Luxemburg and Belgian governments. . • . 
The wrong — I speak frankly — ^that we are 
committing we will endeavor to make good 
as soon as our military goal has been 
reached." 

And he was followed in his fatuous 
irreverence by ninety-three of the most hon- 
ored names in German academic circles. 
These misguided men issued a manifesto 
several months after the iniquitous war had 
begun, and circulated it broadcast through- 
out America, in which they denied point- 
blank the iniquity of Germany, and de- 
fended the action of their government. In 
An Appeal to the Civilized World, these 
ninety-three professors declare that Ger- 
many did not cause the war; did not violate 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 145 

the neutrality of Belgium (thereby showing 
themselves more conscienceless than the im- 
perial chancellor) ; did not destroy Louvain; 
was guilty of no oppression or atrocities in 
Belgium; and must depend on her militar- 
ism to safeguard her civilization. Ninety- 
three "procurers to the Lords of Hell." 
Tennyson is to Be thanked for the pungent 
phrase. 



U6 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XXIX 

THE "LORDS OF HELL" 

The man whom the German people have 
idolized dm*ing these years of warfare, into 
whose monstrous statue in Berlin they have 
driven nails in token of fealty to his ideals, 
comes nearer to the conception of a "Lord 
of Heir* than any other prominent mod- 
erner. Marshal von Hindenburg is the in- 
carnation of militarism, which these time- 
servers defend as the salvation of German 
civilization, or Kultur. To quote their own 
words in the egregious address: "Were it 
not for German militarism, German civiliza- 
tion would long since have been extirpated." 
What are the principles of this hero of Ger- 
man militarism, this saviour of "holy" Ger- 
many? To a diplomat he declared in a 
confidential talk several years ago, before 
he became a national idol: "Barbarians un- 
derstand war better than we Europeans. 
They have no rules, no codes, no conventions 
in war. Kill your enemy in any way you 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 147 

can and when you have killed in sufficient 
numbers, so that he can no longer resist 
you, enslave him — ^that is the barbarian 
theory of war, and it is the right one. I have 
never met a Russian that I should not take 
a pleasure in killing. I hate them, and if I 
live to command our armies against them 
in the next war I hope I shall kill thousands 
of them — I look forward to killing them 
with pleasure." The utter barbarism of the 
General amazed the listener. He gloried in 
being "the biggest liar on earth," and hinted 
very broadly that Germany would begin the 
war with a "lie so well established that the 
world would not believe him if he denied it." 
As commander-in-chief in East Prussia, 
Von Hindenburg ordered that bread which 
had been found soaked in paraffin should be 
given as food to Russian prisoners, thus 
poisoning thousands of helpless men. At 
the Masurian lakes he refused to accept the 
surrender of the Russian divisions, and 
drove them by the scores of thousands of 
officers and men into the swamps and quick- 
sands, where they were raked with shrapnel 
and machine gun fire, in order to expedite 
their destruction by drowning and suffoca- 



148 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

tion. The death cries of these ill-fated Rus- 
sians still ring in the ears of many of the 
more humane among the Germans. The 
horror unspeakable of the scene made a 
maniac of the young Duke of Brunswick, 
who was serving at that time in the German 
army on the East front. 

The gospel of Hate, as enunciated by this 
Prussian idol, is the creed of hell. "Never 
before," declared the diplomat from whom 
I have already quoted, "never before had I 
heard a European speak thus in the Ian- | 
guage of a painted savage." 

When men, especially those in authority, 
cease to hold sternly to the good as a stand- 
ard, the declension is rapid. With a con- 
fessedly Machiavellian policy, a deliberate 
justifying of evil in the name of the state, 
the HohenzoUerns seem to have lost the 
moral sense, and are to-day, in the words 
of an aHenist, "moral imbeciles." Lords of 
Germany, they misused their place and 
privileges, and became "lords of hell." So 
persistent has been the tampering with truth 
in and by Berlin during the past few decades 
that the sensitive conscience of a whole peo- 
ple has been dulled — a deplorable result of 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 149 

immoral autocracy. Satan, Milton's "Em- 
peror of Hell," has been aptly termed the 
"Father of Lies." Autocrats who copy him 
in this characteristic soon become his whole- 
hearted servants, his representatives on earth 
until eternal Providence asserts herself in 
their ruin. 



150 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XXX 

SPIRITUAL BANKRUPTCY 

A FRANK acceptance of Machiavellianism 
has led Germany into spiritual bankruptcy. 
Who were signers of the Manifesto sup- 
porting Hindenburg's and Von Bissing's 
ruthless policy, and have continued timid 
slaves ever since? Professors Ehrlich and 
Eucken are among them, at whose feet, re- 
marks Mr. Church, in his unanswerable 
Reply, many of us Americans have sat as 
Paul sat at the feet of Gamaliel. Add 
Albert Ehrhard, Adolf Deissmann, Ger- 
hard Esser, Anton Koch, Josef Mausbach, 
Sebastian Merkle, Adolf von Schlatter, 
August Schmidlin, Reinhold Seeberg, all 
professors of theology or sacred history, 
seeking to expound a "divine philosophy"; 
Heinrich Finke, Alis Knoepfler, Maxi- 
milian Lenz, Eduard Meyer, Alois Riehl, 
Martin Spahn, Wilhehn Windelbrand, Wil- 
hehn Wundt, professors of history or phi- 
losophy, to whom the world had been used 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 151 

to look for the enunciation of truth and 
noble thinking. All of them failed inglori- 
ously and deplorably; all of them became 
"procurers of the Lords of Hell"; all of 
them supported the bestial policy of hate 
and cruelty enunciated and carried out by 
the "hero" Hindenburg. They have given 
a pungent meaning for all time to Tenny- 
son's prophetic words. 

This Manifesto should be read and di- 
gested by Americans to-day. These egre- 
gious signers begin by terming themselves 
"heralds of truth," and preface each para- 
graph with the phrase, '^Es ist nicht wahr" 
— "It is not true" — a degradation of the 
word wahVj which will need many centuries 
to have the stain wiped from it. It is no 
longer the equivalent of our Enghsh "true," 
of the French vrai, of the Italian vero. The 
"divine philosophers" of Germany have suc- 
ceeded admirably in defiling their own na- 
tive tongue. What do they declare is not 
true — ist nicht wahr? First, "that Germany 
is guilty of having caused this war"; sec- 
ondly, "that we trespassed in neutral Bel- 
gium"; thirdly, "that the life and property 
of a single Belgian citizen was injured by 



16g THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

our soldiers without the bitterest self-defense 
having made it necessary"; fourthly, "that 
our troops treated Louvain brutally"; 
jBfthly, "that our warfare pays no respect to 
international laws" ; sixthly, "that the combat 
against our so-called militarism is not a com- 
bat against our civilization, as our enemies 
hypocritically pretend." These six state- 
ments they deliberately deny, closing with 
the appeal: "Have faith in us! BeUeve that 
we shall carry on this war to the end as a 
civilized nation, to whom the legacy of a 
Goethe, a Beethoven and a Kant is just as 
sacred as its own hearts and homes. For 
this we pledge you our names and our 
honor/^ 

If German paper currency is as worthless 
as this pledge, then the country surely is 
bankrupt. What is German Ehre^ "honor," 
worth to-day in the spiritual market, now 
it has been degraded by these ninety-three 
self -termed "heralds of truth"? Universi- 
ties, the homes of study and high thinking, 
should also be the guardians of our lan- 
guage, keeping it pure and sweet. Can the 
words "truth," "honor," "fair play," "de- 
cency," as used at our centers of learning 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 153 

by our youth, the hope of the nation, be any 
longer translated adequately into German? 
Tennyson answers in his fateful lines. The 
German professors, who ought to be 
guardians of the treasures of divine philoso- 
phy, have sold their heritage for a mess of 
pottage. 



154 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XXXI 

KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT REVER- 
ENCE AND CHARITY 

In a late section of the poem (CXIV), 
Tennyson dwells on the dangers of knowl- 
edge-acquisition, at the expense of the 
deeper things of the soul; a subject touched 
upon in the Invocation : 

"Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell." 

In this passage the poet seems to foresee the 
advent of a brutal power, depending fatu- 
ously on its mental and physical endow- 
ments, and endeavoring to lay the whole 
world prostrate. At the time the poem was 
in press, just before the Great Exhibition at 
Sydenham in London, it was warmly con- 
tended by many that a general diffusion of 
knowledge would bring in the millennium. 
Tennyson was profoundly skeptical of any 
such result, so he warns us in "The Ancient 
Sage": 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 155 

"For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake, 
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there 
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm." 

This is knowledge from the heedless, super- 
ficial side. But when taken seriously, it 
may become a world menace : 

"What is she, cut from love and faith, 
But some wild Pallas from the brain 

"Of Demons? fiery-hot to burst 
All barriers in her onward race 
For power. Let her know her place; 
She is the second, not the first." 

(CXIV, iii, iv) 

German Kultur has been such a mad race 
after knowledge, as furnishing power and 
superiority, neglecting the while the true 
education which builds up character. We 
saw how Nietzsche, after being attracted by 
the personality of Richard Wagner, the 
great composer, rudely flung aside the 
friendship because the master seemed to lack 
some characteristics which were necessary to 
his vision of the perfect. The basis of that 
friendly love which gives and takes and 
helps seemed absent from Nietzsche's con- 
ception of life. In place of character he 



156 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

substituted an abstraction of his brain, the 
ideal figure of a perfect artist, later to be 
embodied in his Thus Spake Zarathustra. 
How different from the relations between 
Tennyson and Hallam! — 

"O friend, who earnest to thy goal 
So early, leaving me behind, 

**I would the great world grew like thee, 
Who grewest not alone in power 
And knowledge, but from hour to hour 
In reverence and in charity." 

A recent writer in the Fortnightly Review,^ 
referring to the popularity of Nietzsche 
among German soldiers on the one hand and 
the literati on the other, asserts rightly that 
"any system which glorifies one mental 
process at the expense of the others is not 
only psychologically unsound; it ends, as 
might be expected, in ethical conceptions 
and concrete deeds that merit the condemna- 
tion of the world's moral sense." A German 
writer. Professor Dove, defended cruelties 
practiced on the natives of South Africa be- 
cause of the superior German civilization, a 
native having no rights, because he was not 

1 Germany's Ruling Idea, by T. Sharper Knowlsen. October, 
1918. 



OF «IN MEMORIAM" 157 

"of the same ^i^Zfi^r-position as ourselves." 
After tricking the poor Hereros out of their 
cattle and grazing lands, the German trad- 
ers, with official encouragement, went about 
robbing the Hereros over the border of their 
cattle. Nor did they scruple to seize the 
Hereros' sacred cattle which were inalien- 
able by tribal law, and with that appalling 
lack of decency which we now know to be a 
German characteristic, they deliberately 
desecrated the sacred burial-place of the 
Herero chiefs by cutting down the grove and 
turning the place into a vegetable garden. 
For other facts of the same nature, the 
reader may consult the recent Report on the 
Natives of South Africa and Their Treat- 
ment by Germany, published by the Admin- 
istrator of the conquered territory for the 
Union of South Africa; the most terrible 
exposure, says the London Spectator, of 
systematic brutality, treachery, and immor- 
ality that even this war has brought us. 

Tennyson turned away from art divorced 
from love and life in the person of Goethe, 
one distinguished German. He also fore- 
saw the appalling consequences of immoral 
force, or Macht, which was to be exemplified 



im THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

in the personality of another great German, 
Prince Bismarck. Twice does Tennyson use 
the phrase "ape and tiger" as cuhninating 
an irreligious pursuit of worldly and intel- 
lectual aims. Section CXVIII ends with 
the warning: 

"Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die." 

He repeats the conjunction and the warning 
in "The Making of Man," in a stanza al- 
ready quoted. Treitschke bluntly advises 
the very opposite, declaring that power is 
neither more or less than the "brute" force 
of arms; so the "brute" in us should be care- 
fully developed. Bismarck may be said to 
have fulfilled the ideal of subtlety and bru- 
tality simamed up in the conjunction of ape 
and tiger. "He played on other nations," 
says a recent writer, "at once so subtly and 
so brutally that he himself created the 
measured tangles from which his adroitness 
escaped. . . . This man of iron played 
tricks with Europe like a monkey, or rather 
a baboon." In the final issue — for the mills 
of God often work slowly — his policy meant 
ruin and degradation. "His own end," con- 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 159 

tinues the reviewer, "was a tragedy. He 
was degraded from his dictatorship — ^kicked 
into retirement by the young and graceless 
hothead whose megalomanias he had ren- 
dered possible. Bismarck called into being 
the monster that devoured him. But he also 
fabricated the monster that was to desolate 
Europe. Never would he have declared the 
present war, at any rate at the present hour. 
But he made it feasible, credible, possible.'' 
And now his graceless pupil is a miserable 
and despised exile. It is strange and sig- 
nificant that the very words of Tennyson's 
spiritual forecast, made eighty years ago, 
should be of value to political thinkers to- 
day. Bismarck and his pupil Wilhelm de- 
veloped the "ape and tiger" qualities in the 
national life, in place of suppressing them, 
and Germany, far from "moving upward," 
has moved downward to final weakness and 
contempt. 

Tennyson's vision of a hopeful civilization 
degraded by a mad philosophy has been won- 
derfully portrayed for us in a recent poem, 
entitled "The Armistice,"^ by an American 
author, Mr. W. A. Phelon, of Cincinnati, 

»The Times-Star, November 7. 1918. 



160 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

who, it will be noted, uses the significant 
symbol of the tiger: 



(( 



And this was Germany — this pufF of dust, 
This worn gray shoddy, and this iron rust! 

"This was the Germany where Goethe wrote, 
Where Mendelssohn gave forth his golden note. 
Where Schiller won our hearts with matchless 

word, 
Where Wagner's greatest triumphs first were 

heard ! 
We loved you, when your poets nobly sang 
Of Liberty — ^we heard the sabers clang 
These seventy years gone by — and when you 

hushed 
The Voice of Liberty, and when you crushed 
Those who dreamed high in 1848, 
We welcomed them with open, wide-thrown gate. 
*I fought mit Sigel' — and no braver word 
Through all our ringing history has been heard ! 
Franz Sigel, soul of German freedom, you. 
Outlawed at home, received with us your due ! 
We loved you, Germany — and when you turned 
Upon us like a tiger, and you spurned 
A century's devotion — dazed, aghast. 
We took the blow, and then we grimly massed 
Our bannered legions to the direful task 
Of tearing off the Hohenzollern mask. 

"And this was Germany ! Our warriors pressed 
Onward and forward till the battle test 
Showed that the Eagle of the Western wave 
Conquers at will the abject, beaten slave! 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 161 

And this was Germany ! Our troopers tread 
In serried ranks above thy vanquished head — 
The horror of thy work recoils at last 
On thine own land, as when a tempest blast. 
Turned in mid course, sweeps murderously back, 
Leaving a hideous welter in its track ! 

"And this was Germany — this puff of dust, 
This worn gray shoddy, and this iron rust!" 



16^ THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 



CHAPTER XXXII 

THE RESTITUTION OF ALL 
THINGS 

The vision of the restitution or "restora- 
tion" of all things was always present to the 
poet. He was eager to conceive — ^nay, he i 
reveled in the thought — of a world that 
should function wholly for good, from which 
hate should be eliminated, where love should i 
reign triumphant. Was not this vision a J 
heritage of all the holy prophets since the 
world began? Thinking cosmically, through i 
modern processes, he dallied with the hope 
of Universalism: 

"That nothing walks with aimless feet; ^ 

That not one life shall be destroyed. 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God has made the pile complete." 

He shrank from the annihilation of life in 
any form; he turned away from an eternity 
of irremediable woe, as inconsistent with the 
real glory of God. It was not that his faith 
was feeble. A Scottish evangelist, Dr. John 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 163 

McNeil, in his public addresses, has com- 
mented unfavorably on these lines : 

"But what am I? 
An infant crying in the night ; 
An infant crying for the light: 
And with no language but a cry." 

"No, no, Alfred," he would exclaim; "we 
have a full light and revelation in the gospel 
of Christ." But Tennyson's trouble was an 
intellectual one, dealing with the finality of 
evil, a subject on which the Gospels are not 
dogmatic. Orthodoxy has varied in this in- 
terpretation of the matter. It was quite 
natural for devout Christian painters in 
mediasval times to depict the tortures of the 
damned on the canvas, along with the hap- 
piness of the blessed, and as not interfering 
with that blessedness. Extreme Calvinism, 
as in the rhetoric of Jonathan Edwards, 
with his "angry God," found a grun satis- 
faction in the dual picture. All their suffer- 
ings were supposed to inure to the "glory of 
God"; saints looked on and were satisfied. 
Within our own times, in Presbyterian theo- 
logical schools, students have been gravely 
asked whether they were willing — if that 
were necessary — ^to be damned for "the 



164 THE SPIRITUAL MEANING 

glory of God." In this unhappy way was 
the noble tenet of the absolute sovereignty 
of heaven's King pushed beyond all reason- 
able limits. It made God an unloved, 
capricious Emperor, who uses human be- 
ings like slaves in the assertion of a hollow 
glory. 

Methodism, preaching a free gospel, 
swung away from this eternal duaHsm of 
blessedness and suffering; and out of it came 
a "left wing" — ^the teaching of John Mur- 
ray and Universalism — ^which insisted on a 
final monism of blessedness as a cardinal 
doctrine of Christian faith. It cannot be 
said that the new emphasis, with its inevi- 
table tendency to belittle the great fact of 
Evil, has justified itself in any remarkable 
way ; the tests being conduct and life. From 
Tennyson's timid utterance "[I] faintly 
trust the larger hope," Dean Farrar bor- 
rowed the title of his book. The Larger 
Hope, and there are consistent believers in 
Universahsm in the Anglican and other 
churches. Yet Tennyson's doubt remained; 
practically he reserved his decision. In- 
deed, this attitude marks the close of the 
fifty-sixth section, which is a climax. With 



OF "IN MEMORIAM" 165 

it, indeed, the "problem" of In Memoriam 

may be said to close. He cannot solve the 

mystery of evil : 

"What hope of answer or redress? 
Behind the veil, behind the veil." 

But of his religious faith and trust there is 
no question, even while confessing his intel- 
lectual doubts and fears: 

"No, like a child in doubt and fear: 
But that blind clamor made me wise; 
Then was I like a child that cries. 
But crying, knows his father near; 

"And what I am beheld again 

What is, and no man understands ; 
And out of darkness came the hands 
That reach through nature, molding men." 

(CXXIV, v, vi) 

The Saviour, in leaving the world, left the 
Spirit of Truth to guide us into all truth; 
and room was left for doubt and strivings in 
the struggle for fuller light. It was so with 
Tennyson's idolized Hallam: 

"He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
He would not make his judgment blind. 
He faced the specters of his mind 
And laid them: thus he came at length 

"To find a stronger faith his own." 

(XCVI, iv) 



166 "IN MEMORIAM" 

The result was power, real light, not the 
fantastic demon of the brain conceived by 
German intellectuals, but that eternal power 
of character which rests on the revelation of 
the Son of God, his life within our hearts, 
and the submission of our petty himian wills 
to the divine will. 



THE END 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Science and a Future Life. By Frederick Wil- 
liam Henry Myers. The Macmillan Company, 
1893. 

The last book published in the lifetime of this 
accomplished man. His Human Personality and 
the Survival of Bodily Death appeared from the 
press of Longmans, Green & Co. ten years later, 
and there is a later abridged edition of date 1907. 
To a Tennyson student his Essays, Classic and 
Modern, especially the essay on Virgil, are of 
value; The Macmillan Company, 1883. Also his 
Wordsworth in the English Men of Letters series. 

Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, By 
Houston Steward Chamberlain. A translation 
from the German by John Lees. With an In- 
troduction by Lord Redesdale. London; John 
Lane, 1911. 

The author, son of a British admiral, and 
brother of the distinguished philologist Professor 
Basil Hall Chamberlain, late of Tokyo Univer- 
sity, married a daughter of Richard Wagner, and 
became more German than the Germans. Lord 
Redesdale, a diplomatist, is author of the classic 
book, Redesdale's (Mitford's) Tales of Old Japan. 
Chamberlain's book is a brilliant attempt to estab- 
lish a racial and inherent superiority in the Teu- 
tonic, particularly the German people. 

The Gospel of Superman. The Philosophy of 

167 



168 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated from the 
French of Henri Lichtenberger, with an Intro- 
duction by J. J. Kennedy, author of The Quin- 
tessence of Nietzsche* T. H* Foulis, Edin- 
burgh and London, 1910. 

Professor Lichtenberger's book, written with 
all the lucidity of the skilled Frenchman, has 
passed through fourteen editions. Mr. Kennedy's 
Introduction betrays his sympathy with the 
philosopher, and his preference of so-called "mas- 
ter" to "slave" morality, that is, of autocracy to 
Christian democracy. 

The Political Philosophy of Hemrich von Treit- 
schke. By H. W. C. Lewis. London; Con- 
stable, 1914. 

Deductions from the World-War. By Baron 
Freytag von Loringhoven. New York; G. P. 
Putnam's Sons, 1918. 
The author is an unrepentant militarist plan^ 

ning for another great war. 

Platonism, By Paul Elmer More. Princeton 

University Press, 1918. 

This is the sixth of the series of Louis Clark 
Vanuxem Foundations delivered in Princeton Uni- 
versity in recent years. The author has since 
been asked to deliver a course of lectures on 
Platonism to the advanced students of theology 
at Princeton. 

He is author of the excellent series of Shel- 
hurne Essays, now in the ninth issue. These 
studies, literary and philosophical, uphold the 
higher law in life and conduct. The essay on 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 169 

Wordsworth, our great Platonic poet, is espe- 
cially valuable in this connection. 

It was just here that a modern classicist like 
Matthew Arnold would have rested, finding his 
spiritual base in the "stoic resolve and self-deter- 
mination" praised by Dr. Paul Elmer More in 
his essay on Tennyson, where he commends 
Arnold at the expense of our poet. But Arnold 
gives us but "Sweetness and Light", and not the 
more valuable Life; and he leaves his dead friend 
Clough a shade among the Elysian fields, at the 
close of Thyrsis. He thus fails to adjust his 
vision to the Christian ideal. 

Dr. More is less satisfactory with his essay on 
Tennyson, to be found in the same seventh volume 
of the Shelburne Essays. Here he strikes the 
same note as in his Platonism (page 75) ; a prefer- 
ence for pagan stoicism to Paul's passionate faith 
in a future life with the Master, as essential to 
happiness in the present world. Dr. More 
definitely rejects the apostle's declaration: "If in 
this life only we have faith in Christ, we are of 
all men most miserable." It is no wonder, then, 
that he misses the warmth and reality permeating 
the stanzas of In Memoriam, and complains of 
their coldness and sentimentality. 

On Contemporary Literature. By Stuart P. 

Sherman. Henry Holt & Co., 1917. 

The studies are dedicated to Paul Elmer More, 
and follow the same line of high discussion, insist- 
ing on a higher law. The author is head of the 
English department at the University of Illinois. 

The American Verdict on the War. Together 



170 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

with the "Appeal to the Civilized World" of 
the ninety-three professors, to which it is a 
reply, and their names. By Samuel Harden 
Church. Toledo ; The Norman and Remington 
Co., 1915. 

A clean-cut and crushing bit of logic from a 
capable and unbiased critic. 

The English-Speaking Peoples. Their Future 
Relations and Joint International Obligations. 
By George Louis Beer. New York; The Mac- 
millan Co., 1917. 
A book of singular insight and wide horizon. 

Alfred Lord Tennyson. A Memoir. By his son. 
New York ; The Macmillan Co. 

"I have lived my life, and that which I have done 
May He within Himself make pure." 

Tennyson. How to Know Him. By Raymond 
Macdonald Alden. Indianapolis; Bobbs-Mer- 
rill Co., 1917. 

Human Immortality. Two Supposed Objections 
to the Doctrine. By William James. Boston; 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Second Edition, 1899. 

The Religion of the Samurai. A Study of Zen 
Philosophy and Discipline in China and Japan ; 
by Kaiten Nukariya, Professor of Keio-gi-jiku 
University and of So-to-shu Buddhist College, 
Tokyo. London; Luzac & Co. The fourth of 
Luzac's Oriental Religious Series. 

Charles Simeon. In Leaders of Religion series. 
By H. C. G. Moule, D.D. London; Methuen 
«tCo. 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX 



Adams, Professor John 

Crouch, 35 
iEonian evolution, 66, 101 
iEons, 100, 106-108 
Aerial warfare, 12 
Airy, the astronomer, 36 
Aitken, Professor, 34 
Alden, Professor R. A., 134- 

136 
Ape and tiger, 158-159 
Appeal to the Civilized 

World, 144-145, 150 
Aristocratic morality, 23, 25 
Art, 84, 119 

Arminians, 128, 131-132 
Armistice, The, 160 
Arnold, Matthew, 49, 118 
Augustine, 15 

Beer, George Louis, 109 
Beethoven, 152 
Belgium, 33 
Berlin University, 114 
Bergson, 98 

Bethmann-Hollweg, von, 144 
Bhavagadgita, 104 
Bismarck, 110, 158 
Blackwood's Magazine, 67 
Brooke, Lord, 43 
Brunswick, Duke of, 148 
Buddhism and immortality, 

96-98 
Burke, Edmund, 30-31 
Byron, 118 

Calvin, John, 15, 127, 140 
Calvinism, 87, 128, 163 
Cambridge, 36, 76, 89, 123, 

132-133 
Cambridge Platonists, 88, 

100, 123 
Campbell, Lewis, 110 
Canning, George, 33 
Carlyle, Thomas, 115. 125 



Carrier pigeons, 33 
Chaldean astrologers, 99 
Challis, Professor James, 36 
Chalmers, Thomas, 15, 24, 128 
Chamberlain's Foundations 

of the XlXth Century, 

124. 134 
Chesterton, Cecil, 37 
Choir Invisible, The, 74 
Comtists, 78 

Crossing the Bar, 54, 103 
Cuckoo, Ode to the, 30-31 

Dante, 119 

Darwin, 90 

Dead selves, 39, 41, 117 

Democracy and Christianity, 

21 
Dickens, 67 
Dinah Morris, 71 
Dove, Professor, 156 
Drummond, Henry, 27-28 
Duff, Alexander, 129 

Edinburgh Review, 114 
Edwards, Jonathan, 163 
Egyptian care for the dead, 

92-94 
Electric telegraph, 33 
Enlightened selfishness, 69 
Evil, mystery of, 139, 141. 164 
Evolution, 17 

Far, Far Away, 135 
Farrar, Canon, 164 
Faust, 118 

Federation of the world, 14 
Fitzgerald, Edward, 54, 57, 

67, 116, 120 
Flint, Robert, 24 
Fool of loss, 43 
Foreign Quarterly, 115 
France, 13 
Francis of Assisi, 15, 119 



171 



172 



INDEX 



Frederick the Great, 109 
French philosophers, 25 
Freytag-Loringhoven's De- 
ductions from the World 
War, 111 
Friendship of Elizabethan 
times, 43 

Galle, Johann Gottfried, 35 

Geneva, 128 

George Eliot, 71-77 

Give Me the Wings of Faith, 

52-53 
Gladstone, W. E., 40, 103 
Goethe, 12, 15, 16, 25, 114- 

121. 152, 157 
Grant, Sir Robert, 128-129 
Gregory, G. Douglas, 113 
Greville, Fulke, 43 
Grimm, Professor, 118 
Guardian angel, 92-94 

Haeckel, 9, 98 

Hallam, Arthur, 12, 40, 117, 

165 
Hands All Round, 13 
Hardy, Thomas, 79-80 
Hate and nationalism, 110, 

148 
Hebrews, Epistle to the, 54 
Hegel, 9, 143 
Herbarium siccum, 91 
Herschel, 35 
Hindenburg, Marshal von, 

70, 146-148, 150 
Hobbes, 109 
Holy of Holies, 56 

Immortality, 37, 51, 74 
India, 129 

Inhibition, law of, 125 
Interest as a commercial 

word, 68 
Italy, 119 

James, William, 32, 101, 104- 

106 
Jeffrey, Francis, 115 



Johnsonian common sense, 

122 
Jowett, Benjamin, 11, 68, 

103, 110 
Junkerdom of Prussia, 109 

Kant, Immanuel, 124, 136, 

152 
Kellner, Leon, 29 
Kennedy, J. M., 82 
Kinder, Kuechcy Kirche, 62 
Kultur, 21, 29, 69, 120, 125, 

146, 155 

Legend of Jubal, 73 
Leverrier, 36 
Lewes, George Henry, 75 
Lichtenberger, Henri, 82 
Lick telescope, 82 
Life, 49, 84, 85 
Locksley Hall, 12, 34 
Logos, The, 82, 132, 134 
Love, 38, 40-42, 63, 74, 85, 

135 
Lowell, James Russell, 100 
Luther, Martin, 15, 109 

Machiavelli, 109, 111 

Machiavellian attitude to- 
ward evil, 109, 139, 144 

Machiavellianism, 128, 132, 
140, 148, 150 

Maeterlinck, Maurice, 51 

Magruder, Julia, 39 

Making of Man, The, 108 

Manning, Cardinal, 93 

Milton, 17, 26, 59, 60, 74, 77, 
140 

More, Henry, 100 

More, Paul Elmer, 49, 125 

Morley, Viscount, 128 

Muensterberg, 98 

Murray, John, 164 

Myers, Frederic W. H., 75 

Napoleon, 48 
Neo-Hegelians, 143 
Neptune, 35 



INDEX 



173 



Newton, Sir Isaac, 36 
Nietzsche, 12, 19, 29, 60, 63, 

80, 82, 122, 137, 155-156 
Nirvana, Buddhist doctrine 

of, 95-96 
Nukariya, K., 96-98 

Ovid, 93 

Parliament of man, 14 
Paul. 9, 67, 102 
Pauline ethics, 61, 68 
Paulsen, Frederick, 136 
Personality, 95 
Phelon, W. H., 159 
Philistine, 20 
Plato, 81, 82, 86, 100, 121, 

123-124, 135 
Positivist school, 74 
Pragmatism, 32, 33 
Procurers of the lords of hell, 

145 
Providence, 29 
Pseudo-Platonism, 125 
Psychopompos, 99 
Puritanism, 30, 89 

Refraction, phenomenon of, 
17 

Reminiscence, Platonic doc- 
trine of, 87, 98 

Ring, The, 100-101 

Roscoe's sonnet, 72 

Rossetti's Blessed Damosel, 
65 

Rousseau, 86 

Ruskin, 84 

Satan, 140, 149 
Saul of Tarsus, 15 
Schopenhauer, 19, 20, 45 
Science, 34 
Secular, 106 
Selborne, Lord, 103 
Self, deification of, 22 
Seneca, 49 

Shakespeare's CXVIth son- 
net, 42 



Shakespeare's Lear, 41 
Sherman, Stuart P., 122 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 43 
Sign of the Seeker, 22 
Sign Seeker, A, 80 
Simeon, Charles, 128-131 
Socrates, 81, 82, 86, 125, 135 
Spectator, London, 157 
Strauss, Dr. Richard, 25 
Swedenborg, 102 

Taine's History of English 

Literature, 66-67 
Tennyson, Hallam (Memoir), 

13 
Thoth, scribe of the gods, 92 
Thus Spake Zarathustra, 19, 

25 
Tindale's New Testament, 56 
Tolstoy, 64 

Trappist monks, 42, 45 
Treitschke, 12, 110-113 
Troeltsch, Ernst, 29 
Twice-born men, 15, 19 
Two Voices, The, 55 

Universalism, 162, 164 
Uranus, 35 

Veil, 54-57. 101, 104 
Victor Hours, 80 

Wagner, Richard, 137-138, 

155 
Wahr, degradation of the 

word, 151 
Watts, Isaac, 52, 54 
Wesley, John, 15, 128, 130 
Westminster Review, 113 
Will-to-power, 12, 19, 60 
Will of God, 27 
Williams, John, 83, 138 
Wilson, President, 112 
Word, The, 38, 81-83 
Wordsworth, 86, 87, 88, 95, 

118 

Zen, philosophy of, 96 



314-77-2 



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